UC-NRLF 


B    3    33M    271 


ESSAYS    OUT   OF   HOURS 


ESSAYS 
OUT   OF    HOURS 

BY 

CHARLES  SEARS  BALDWIN 


LONGMANS,  GREEN,  AND  CO. 

91  and  93  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York 

london,  bombay,  and  calcutta 

1907 


Copyright,  1907 
By  Charles  Sears  Baldwin 


THE    UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,   U.S.A. 


TO 

G.    E.   B. 


267773 


PREFACE 

The  original  publication  of  these  essays 
is  in  each  case  indicated  by  the  table  of  con- 
tents. It  is  a  pleasure  to  acknowledge  the 
courtesy  with  which  I  have  been  permitted 
to  reprint,  and  to  thank  the  editors. 

C.  S.  B. 
New  Haven,  June,  1907. 


CONTENTS 

Page 
False  Gypsies  {The  Atlantic  Monthly,  March, 

1903) 1 

Salad  {The  Atlantic  Monthly,  February,  1902)  .        8 
Travel  {The  Atlantic  Monthly,  June,  190T)  .     .       12 
"Not  as  One  that  Beateth  the  Air"  {Put- 
nam's Monthly,  June,  1907) 16 

A  Parable  of  America 25 

My  Friend  CoppERriELD(  The  Atlantic  Monthly, 

June,  1901) 34 

Master  Vergil  {The  Atlantic  Monthly,  Decem- 
ber, 1905) 40 

The  Literary  Influence  of  Sterne  in  France 
(Revised  from  Publications  of  the  Modern 
Language  Association  of  America,  xvii.  2, 

May,  1902) 47 

The  Secret  of  John  Bunyan  (Revised  from 
an  edition  of  "The  Pilgrim's  Progress"  in 
Longmans''  English  Classics,  1905)  ....       75 

Three  Studies  in  the  Short  Story  (Revised 
from   "  American    Short    Stories "  in    The 
Wampum  Library  of  American  Literature, 
1904) 
I.  The  Question  of  Derivation  .     .     .     .     110 
II.  The  Tale  in  America  before  1835  .     .     130 
III.  Poe's  Fixing  of  the  Short-Story  Form     143 


UNIV. 


*••    •    *     • 

•       ••  *    % 


False  Gypsies 


One  of  the  best  restaurants  in  new  york, 
and  one  of  the  most  exacting  for  young 
purses,  had  once  its  vogue  among  discon- 
tented youths  of  irrepressible  individuality. 
There  they  found,  on  happier  days,  some 
popular  tenor,  an  approachable  merchant 
from  Martinique,  a  talkative  boulevardier, 
or  some  other  incarnation  of  their  Mistress 
France.  At  least  they  found  one  another. 
When  plain  William  had  failed  once  more 
to  vend  his  erotic  verse,  and  the  undoubted 
distinction  of  Edward's  black  mane  had  not 
yet  sufficed  to  palm  off  his  impressionism, 
and  Herbert  had  a  thing  for  Shady  Side, 
not  quite  finished,  it  was  a  distinct  solace  to 
leave  work  for  condolence  in  the  pose  of 
the  Latin  Quarter.  You  sauntered  into  the 
cafe,  saluted  the  very  business-like  woman 
at  the  counter,  found  a  loose  French  weekly, 
and   sat   beside   a   marble-topped  table   at 


•:•  :       •  fit  <•  I 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


the  window.  The  others  would  arrive  ;  and 
together  you  would  drink  toward  a  serener 
view  of  life.  To  have  hope  rather  than 
faith,  to  be  idle  under  the  guise  of  research 
into  humanity,  to  indulge  a  smattering  of 
French  and  a  taste  for  spirits,  to  talk  dis- 
passionately of  vaudeville,  —  these  made  you 
eligible;  this  was  Bohemian.  Deux  maza- 
granS)  said  with  quiet  assurance,  was  almost 
equivalent  to  conversation.  If  you  expa- 
tiated upon  symbolism  without  boggling  at 
the  absinthe,  you  were  a  Bohemian  pro- 
fessed. What  have  cigarettes  and  uncooked 
criticism  in  a  French  restaurant  to  do  with 
Bohemia  ? 

Something,  no  doubt.  Bohemia  may  be 
entered  by  the  Pass  of  Discontent.  Revolt 
from  the  conventional,  as  it  may  happily 
lead  into  generous  enthusiasm  for  whatever 
asserts  individuality,  may  arise  from  the  as- 
sertion of  one's  own  individuality.  Only, 
the  assertion  is  not  tolerable  for  long  with- 
out proof ;  and  merely  to  put  on  the  man- 
ner of  Bohemia  is  a  convention,  like  any 


z  ••  •  •    • 
•  •  ••:  :  * 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


other.  Alas  !  for  the  perpetual  youths  at 
the  marble-topped  table,  it  was  the  cloak  of 
indolence,  sham  Bohemia  dissipating  the 
alms  of  Philistia.  A  murky  basement  not 
far  away  showed  franker  stuff.  The  com- 
pany that  met  with  friendly  nods  by  the 
long  tables  had  already  weighed  the  price 
of  freedom.  Each  held  his  half-success  in 
what  he  loved  and  believed,  and  the  fellow- 
ship of  those  who  measured  life  so,  worth  a 
hall  bed-room,  and  plain,  irregular  meals. 
The  cutting  away  of  pretence,  instead  of 
bringing  a  crop  of  cynicism,  left  the  ground 
clear  for  the  best  of  talk,  for  a  criticism  of 
life  which,  though  sometimes  thin,  was  never 
unreal.  They  were  not  artists  and  poets, 
nor  even  journalists,  but  second-rate  illus- 
trators, story-writers,  and  essayists  in  the 
dear  leisure  of  a  newspaper  day,  serious 
students  of  ideas,  —  ideas  hasty  enough,  it 
might  chance,  but  still  ideas.  So  dinner 
was  an  unaffected  gayety,  —  the  higher  if 
there  had  been  no  luncheon,  —  asking  no 
stimulus  beyond  the  cheap  ordinary  wine  and 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


the  man  across  the  table.  The  low  room 
clashed  with  conversation  and  laughter, 
reeked  with  pipe-smoke  ;  but  there  was  no 
other  intemperance.  Until  the  foothold  was 
gained,  the  mastery  won,  this  for  them  was 
life.  Brave  travelers,  they  chose  Bohemia 
for  their  crossing. 

And  Bohemia  repaid  the  choice.  At  the 
long  tables  one  was  free  to  wear  his  own 
guise  without  apology,  and  sure  of  the  wel- 
come he  gave.  It  was  the  code  that  you 
might  not  address  a  novice,  however  promis- 
ing he,  however  talkative  you,  until  he 
opened  the  way  ;  but  that  you  might  smoke 
your  rat-tail  cigar  on  the  back  of  a  friend's 
chair,  or  on  the  table  after  the  apples  and 
cheese.  When  music  came  in  from  the 
street,  harp  or  guitar  and  violin  tucking 
themselves  between  tables  against  the  wall, 
the  whole  roomful  would  sometimes  chink 
the  measure  on  glasses,  or  sing  a  chorus  from 
Trovatore.  On  one  supreme  evening  the 
taciturn  Colonel  left  his  spaghetti,  flung  a 
coat-tail   over   each   arm,  and  with   a   fine 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


decorous  abandon  danced  up  and  down  the 
midst,  precisely  nimble.  There  was  a  roar 
of  applause  at  this  hyperbole  of  the  spirit  of 
the  place  ;  but  the  Colonel,  having  had  his 
fling,  resumed  his  fork  without  word  or 
smile.     He  had  expressed  himself. 

Withal  it  would  have  been  hard  to  find 
a  tavern  stricter.  The  few  women  that  came 
were  reporters,  eager  sometimes  in  talk, 
smoking  when  they  chose,  but  rarely  expan- 
sive, and  commonly  in  the  sober  dignity  of 
middle  age ;  or  minor  singers  with  their 
husbands,  a  hard-working  few,  less  adept  in 
conversation.  Of  drinking  there  was  very 
little.  Money  was  too  hard  won,  and  this 
was  distinctly  a  place  to  eat  in.  When  an 
Italian  opera  singer  and  his  presumable 
patron  stumbled  in  by  chance  one  evening 
and  talked  tipsily  loud  —  no  more  —  Teresa 
was  in  from  the  kitchen,  ordering  them  from 
her  house  in  brave  Italian  and  broken  Eng- 
lish. The  company  silently  approved,  and 
they  never  came  again. 

For  its  little  while,  the  time  of  passage, 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


this  was  a  solace  in  discipline.  To  be  free, 
to  be  worthy  of  your  neighbor's  keen  ques- 
tion, to  give  and  take  the  ease  of  simple 
gayety  that  you  may  the  better  summon 
yourself,  it  is  a  colored  life.  But  not  for 
long.  Rather,  "  Woe  is  me  that  I  have  my 
habitation  among  the  tents  of  Kedar."  They 
that  dwell  in  Bohemia  because  they  have 
unlearned  the  way  forth  suffer  dreary  and 
repulsive  decline.  An  old  gypsy  is  tolerable 
only  if  he  be  a  real  gypsy,  not  in  choice  or 
lapse  of  will,  but  in  the  blood.  This  is  the 
race  whose  journey  has  no  end,  for  whom  life 
and  all  the  world  is  Bohemia,  only  a  space 
for  travel.  Moving  always  on  the  highway, 
stopping  always  short  of  the  city,  these  are 
no  shiftless  tramps  in  wagons,  but  a  race 
doomed  to  make  no  progress  except  in  physi- 
cal distance,  and  to  make  that  always,  to  kill 
time.  For  any  but  the  blood  to  spend  a 
lifetime  on  the  road  is  as  unnatural  as  for 
this  blood  to  keep  house.  The  real  gypsies 
are  happy,  doubtless,  as  the  nomads  of  the 
world's  childhood.     Perpetual  youth  is  per- 


FALSE  GYPSIES 


petual    limitation ;    once   the   limitation   is 
seen,  intolerable  to  any  zeal  for  manhood. 

To  us  others,  not  of  the  blood,  even  to 
the  least  conventional  of  an  elaborate  civili- 
zation, Bohemia  must  be  a  country  of  inns, 
—  inns  for  the  poor  adventurous  young,  re- 
sponsive to  the  freedom  in  others  which  they 
must  have  in  themselves.  Like  the  actual 
Switzerland,  it  is  only  for  our  summer.  A 
careless  while  to  have  no  home  is  to  some 
men,  fewer  women,  an  exhilaration.  To  let 
slip  the  hope  of  home  is  a  cowardice  or  a 
curse.  Clap  pack  on  back,  then,  or  ship  as 
stowaways  for  the  seacoast  of  Bohemia.  But 
be  ready  for  random  fare  and  a  truss  of 
hay ;  be  ready  also  to  go  on,  or  else  to 
return,  even  to  Philistia,  not  ungrateful  for 
memories. 


Salad 


A  SOUP  GARDEN  IS  A  PHRASE  OF  THE  FRENCH, 

too  nice  for  America.  Our  gardens  are  in- 
discriminate ;  enough  distinction  merely  to 
have  a  garden.  And  indeed,  for  an  Ameri- 
can moved  to  express  a  further  distinction, 
to  assert  himself  against  provincialism,  better 
than  a  soup  garden  would  be  a  salad  garden. 
To  soup,  though  it  be  accepted  in  too  nar- 
row a  sense,  America  is  largely  converted. 
Even  mountain  taverns  dispense  a  diluted 
tomato  sauce  that  often  has  merit  of  heat. 
But  salad  is  not  even  known  except  to  the 
unrepresentative  few. 

That  salad  is  gone  but  a  little  way,  and 
is  still  a  singularity,  appears  when  American 
women  that  read  book  reviews  are  found  to 
know  it  only  as  involving  fowl  or  lobster, 
and  to  buy  dressing  even  for  these,  as  for 
their  boots,  by  the  bottle.  She  shall  not 
learn  the  rudiments  of  this  craft  who  will  not 


SALAD 


forget  the  grosser  mayonnaise.  And  since, 
under  pressure  of  convention,  as  for  what  is  by 
barbarism  called  a  tea,  she  will  hanker  back 
after  the  fleshpots,  it  is  oftener  he  that  learns. 
In  matters  of  food,  what  moves  through  man 
alone  stems  a  tide  of  distrust  slowly. 

Nor  is  this  without  its  worth  in  support- 
ing the  head  of  the  table;  but  let  the 
head  keep  a  manly  humility.  Let  that  man 
alone  turn  to  mayonnaise  who  has  labored 
seven  years  without  mustard,  and  used  eggs 
as  they  were  golden.  It  is  a  woman's  dress- 
ing, at  best  offering  satiety,  like  the  sugar- 
ings  of  the  sex ;  at  less  than  best  belying 
the  name  of  salad  by  making  what  it  touches 
less  savory.  The  elements  of  all  salads  are 
oil  and  vinegar,  with  salt  and  pepper.  Until 
these  are  his  familiars,  let  no  man  try  be- 
yond. That  the  oil  be  French  or  Italian 
marks  the  fixing  of  personality.  The  vine- 
gar may  well  add  tarragon,  the  pepper  be 
from  Nepaul.  But  none  of  these  is  vital ; 
the  proportion  of  each  to  the  material  is  all, 
and  the  happy  hand. 


SALAD 


The  material  is  every  green  herb  for  the 
service  of  man.  Fruit  salads,  though  they 
open  many  inventions,  are  but  toys  to  a  se- 
rious return  to  nature.  First,  let  him  ex- 
plore all  the  greens  of  a  large  market,  and 
combine  boldly  among  the  vegetables  carried 
cold  from  yesterday's  table.  Lettuce,  though 
alone  among  herbs  it  has  vogue,  is  but  ancil- 
lary. To  use  no  other  is  like  knowing  wine 
only  as  champagne.  In  fact,  among  herbs 
lettuce  has  least  character.  Therefore,  after 
the  delicacy  of  its  first  freshness,  its  use  is  in 
conjunction.  But  water  cress  and  celery 
should  be  either  very  thick  in  the  bowl  or 
very  sparse;  for  they  pungently  put  down 
other  savors.  Beyond  this  frontier  is  a  world 
without  rule,  where  each  man  may  be  a  dis- 
coverer and  a  benefactor,  if  he  cast  away 
prejudice.  Prejudice  cannot  consist  with 
salad.  They  that  abjure  cabbage  are  proud 
stomachs,  and  they  that  fear  onion  have 
given  their  souls  to  their  neighbors.  Salad 
without  onion  is  like  blank  verse;  it  needs 
the   master   hand    to    prevail   without   the 

10 


SALAD 


rhyme.  Unprejudiced,  he  that  finds  not  a 
salad  for  every  day,  or  fails  of  happy  solu- 
tions, is  either  improvident  or  dull. 

More  practical  minds  will  see  thrift  as 
well  as  variety  in  the  dispossession  of  flesh 
meat.  Food  without  fire,  pleasant  ministry 
to  digestion  in  despite  of  the  cook,  may  yet 
win  the  mistress.  Meantime  our  hope  is  for 
the  master.  By  a  knack  at  the  bowl,  be  it 
but  to  use  an  old  savory  spoon,  or  to  slice 
his  radishes,  or  to  insinuate  garlic  or  cheese, 
he  keeps  his  state.  His  digestion  is  not  ar- 
rested by  fear;  his  conversation  is  secure. 
Unless  he  be  morose,  he  may  reign  at  his 
table. 


11 


Travel 


1  HE  CURIOUS  FEW  WHO  LINGER  OVER  DICTION- 
ARIES have  been  amused  at  finding  travel 
one  with  travail,  so  far  has  the  sting  of  the 
word  been  drawn  by  time.  While  the  one 
road  of  men  into  the  world  has  remained 
labor,  the  many  roads  over  the  world  have 
been  paved  with  ease.  In  arm-chairs  and 
beds,  by  land  or  sea,  we  were  there  and  we 
are  here.  There  is  no  pain  of  passage.  The 
old  traveler  settled  his  estate  and  asked  for 
prayers  in  church  ;  the  new  traveler  takes 
his  affairs  aboard  and  traffics  as  he  goes. 
Where  there  is  no  interruption,  when  upon 
a  thought  I  am  elsewhere,  remaining  myself 
the  same,  what  is  left  of  travel  ? 

And  while  we  have  made  travel  ease,  we 
have  made  it  a  superfluity.  Will  not  the 
telegraph  serve  my  business  ?  Then  let  me 
step  into  my  closet  to  talk  a  thousand  miles. 
As  for  the  old  grand  tour,  most  men  can 

12 


TRAVEL 


see  Venice  as  well  by  lime-light  as  by  moon- 
light. Cathedrals  lie  on  parlor  tables  ;  and 
Praxiteles  is  brought  to  a  boarding-house. 
Shall  the  ring  of  tourists  gaping  about  a 
guide  in  the  Louvre  see  more  in  her  of  Melos 
than  the  student  with  his  penny  print  ?  For 
the  elect  few  there  may  be  with  a  picture  its 
proper  music  of  race,  its  language,  its  litera- 
ture. One  of  the  widest  travelers  of  my 
acquaintance  had  seen  France  better,  ay,  and 
heard  it,  in  his  own  house  than  ever  he  could 
when  at  last  he  walked  the  soil.  We  that 
so  well  may  travel  may  often  as  well  stay  at 
home. 

For  distance  is  but  relative.  The  next 
county  was  as  distant  to  our  forefathers  as 
now  our  antipodes.  And  there  is  more  in 
this.  At  the  age  of  four  I  thought  the  next 
village  as  far  away  as  now  I  find  Alaska. 
Was  that  earlier  journey  any  the  less  travel  ? 
Surely  I  saw  as  many  marvels  ;  I  was  opened 
as  much  to  the  unknown.  Nor  has  travel 
ever  been  measured  by  distance.  It  is  not 
in   the  miles,  but   in  the   man.     "I   have 

13 


TRAVEL 


traveled,""  said  Thoreau,  "a  good  deal  in 
Concord."  He  also  was  a  traveler  who 
wrote  that  Journey  about  my  Room.  We 
shall  have  travel  so  long  as  we  have 
travelers. 

And  so  long  shall  we  have  travelers'  tales. 
The  whole  world  is  ventilated  by  the  As- 
sociated Press.  The  daily  report  from  Abys- 
sinia is  enhanced  by  Sunday's  photographs. 
But  wherever  Mandeville  goes,  or  Marco 
Polo,  whether  to  Persia  or  the  pole,  on 
elephant  or  automobile  or  on  his  two  feet, 
there  will  be  travelers'  tales,  because  there  is 
a  traveler.  It  is  an  ancient  mariner  that 
we  cannot  choose  but  hear.  It  is  Daniel 
Defoe  that  will  hold  us,  whether  from 
London  to  Land's  End  or  from  London  to 
the  well-charted  isle  of  Juan  Fernandez. 
It  is  that  charming  person  who  called  him- 
self Mandeville.  There  is  a  traveler's  tale 
wherever  there  is  a  man  with  the  wit  to 
travel. 

Travel  has  never  meant,  nor  can  it  mean 
now,  anything   less   than    escape  from   the 

14 


TRAVEL 


commonplace.  Routine  of  shop  or  of  sleep- 
ing-car, that  alone  is  travel  which  ventures 
beyond  this  into  parts  unknown.  And  as 
breach  of  custom  will  always  demand  an 
effort  of  individuality,  so  travel  must  still 
have  travail.  Without  courage  to  try  the 
unknown,  without  weariness  of  the  unpaved 
road,  I  could  never  have  had  the  traveler's 
joy  of  discovering  what  this  new  world  hid 
for  me.  Listen.  It  is  only  ten  miles  from 
Quebec  ;  but  I  discovered  it.  It  is  in  a  coun- 
try store  kept  by  a  habitant ;  but  of  country 
stores  you  may  after  all  know  as  little  as  of 
habitants.  I  who  discovered  it  tell  you  that, 
crossing  the  road  from  the  pink  parsonage 
at  twilight,  I  mounted  four  steps  into  a  dark 
room.  When  I  asked  for  supper  and  bed  — 
But  this  is  not  a  traveler's  tale  ;  it  is  an 
essay  on  travel.  And  its  moral  is  that 
travel  must  still  be  had  on  the  old  terms. 


15 


Not  as  One  that  Beateth 
the  Air" 


Thoreau,s  shed  in  the  woods  is  imprac- 
ticable to  many  people  who  yet  will  not 
admit  that  it  stands  for  a  fallacy.  Rather 
they  see  in  his  theory  something  which,  for 
all  they  cannot  achieve  the  practice,  remains 
hopeful  as  well  as  dear.  If  only  I  might 
simplify  my  life  by  more  direct  application 
of  my  labor  to  my  real  wants  !  This  is  not 
merely  the  cry  of  a  few  reactionaries.  It 
expresses  the  instinctive  protest  against  that 
modern  complication  of  complexity  which 
seems  to  miss  the  end  in  the  means.  So 
much  of  our  energy  is  applied  indirectly  that 
we  seem  forever  held  out  of  touch.  My  own 
bread,  baked  on  the  antiquated  hearth  of 
my  own  building  with  wood  of  my  own  cut- 
ting, is  doubtless  no  more  the  diet  of  phi- 
losophy than  baker's  bread,  baked  over  gas 

16 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


by  certified  members  of  an  international 
union.  Indeed,  to-day's  pot  of  porridge,  if 
I  will  so  simplify  my  meal,  takes  the  less 
time  from  meditation  by  simmering  on  a 
gas  stove.  The  very  type  of  modern  com- 
plexity may  further  simplicity.  Nay,  in 
many  quiet  lodgings  it  does  actually  dis- 
pense at  once  with  servants  and  with  the  dis- 
tracting community  of  the  boarding-house. 
But  it  leaves  a  want  that  can  never  be  anti- 
quated, the  human  want  of  labor  for  human 
hands.  Thoreau's  hard  hoeing  supplied  his 
bean-pot  as  well  as  his  blood  and  his  eye. 
Cannot  I  so  feed  mine? 

Answer  is  instant  and  loud.  The  division 
of  labor  has  bred  a  spawn  of  specialists  for 
muscles  and  modem  nerves.  A  clipping 
from  the  advertisements  of  the  last  maga- 
zine, a  statistical  post-card,  will  bring  full 
prescription,  with  machinery  of  pulleys  and 
rubber.  Only  to  stand  up  to  the  wall  or 
crouch  on  the  chamber  floor,  pulling  and 
pushing  a  good  half-hour  twice  a  day ;  or, 
more  agreeably  dispensing  with  machinery, 


17 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


to  stretch  and  supple  the  frame  by  merely 
waving  arms  and  legs,  weaving  the  trunk, 
dancing,  gesticulating,  rising  and  sinking,  — 
that  will  answer.  It  will  answer.  The  blood 
of  the  sedentary  will  stir.  But  why  is  the 
answer  so  wearisome  ?  Profitable,  doubt- 
less why  is  this  so  flat  and  stale  ?  Be- 
cause of  the  desire,  not  commercial,  no, 
nor  even  utilitarian,  that  the  good  labor 
of  the  arm  shall  not  be  merely  for  the 
labor,  — ■  that  it  shall  be  productive.  Tell 
us,  ye  modern  men  of  science  how  much 
physical  energy  we  modern  men  of  the  desk 
spend  on  pulling  ourselves  up  by  our  own 
boot-straps. 

No,  if  it  were  too  much  to  ask  that 
labor  for  health  should  be  productive,  as 
well  as  labor  for  money,  we  should  not  per- 
sist incorrigibly  in  asking.  Vacations  aside, 
let  us  not  cease  to  ask  how  that  other  work 
which  for  health  we  must  do  in  the  course  of 
work  may  be  turned  toward  the  natural  end 
of  all  work.  The  way  is  nearest  through 
that  very  simplicity  which  is  craved  in  clearer 

18 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


moments ;  and  simplicity  always  demands 
courage.  To  walk  home  in  all  weathers  is 
derogatory  neither  to  rapid  transit  nor  to 
generosity.  That  a  few  cents  are  saved 
thereby  is  properly  an  additional  motive. 
But  this  means  is  both  obvious  and  inade- 
quate. Of  the  manual  labor  about  my 
house,  let  each  philosopher  ask  himself,  what 
might  be  done,  in  the  time  I  must  give  to 
my  body,  by  my  own  hands  ?  The  heaving 
of  coal  into  the  furnace  is  a  way  to  overcome 
modern  complexity  which  many  greater  men 
may  well  learn  of  many  smaller.  If  it  seem 
drudgery,  so  will  seem  the  daily  heaving  of 
a  pulley-weight.  If  it  seem  menial  —  but 
here  we  are  upon  the  ultimate  hindrance  to 
manual  productivity.  Of  the  men  that  will 
heave  coal  in  the  dark  privacy  of  their  own 
cellars,  who  dare  heave  it  into  his  cellar 
from  the  public  street  ?  We  may  allege  the 
grime  ;  but  we  know  grime  is  nothing  to 
the  pleasure  -of  sweating  work  in  open  air. 
A  certain  man,  defeated,  but  still  striving, 
was  wont  to  heave  coal  from  the  northwest 

19 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


corner  of  his  cellar  to  the  southeast,  and 
so  back  again.  Grime  he  had  doubly,  and 
subterranean  air ;  but  he  kept  his  state 
above  ground. 

The  dignity  of  manual  labor  we  are  ready 
to  admit,  even  to  proclaim,  with  our  lips. 
So  long  as  we  deny  it  in  our  double  hearts, 
America  is  still  bound  by  caste.  A  wide 
theme,  verily !  Narrow  it  forthwith  to  the 
sawing  of  wood.  Coal-heaving  in  public  is 
an  ambition  we  may  renounce  to  save  our 
faces ;  but  wood-sawing  in  the  very  eye  of 
the  world  may  be  passed  as  an  interesting 
eccentricity.  Therefore  let  us  not  timidly 
saw  smaller  the  logs  that  are  already  small 
enough,  still  confining  our  labor  to  the  un- 
productive. Though  steam  has  reduced  the 
cost  of  cutting,  cord-wood  as  it  leaves  the 
hand  of  the  chopper  in  the  forest  has  a 
lower  price  than  the  neat  sections  ready  for 
the  hearth.  Moreover  the  thrifty  American 
eye  should  now  and  then  discern  other 
chances  among  the  wreckage  of  modern 
society.     Light-wood,  at  least,  might  often 


20 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


be  had  from  the  crates  for  whose  re- 
moval we  pay  the  dustman.  The  laborer 
for  exercise  is  none  the  less  worthy  of  his 
hire. 

That  most  repulsive  of  modern  undertak- 
ings, the  erection  of  a  gas-tank,  once  supplied 
my  hearth  at  a  rate  to  satisfy  mind  as  well 
as  body.     The  supporting  pillars  of  red  oak 
and  whibe-wood  once  pounded  into  place  by 
the  gasping  pile-driver,  their  ends  were  sawed 
off  level  with  the  black  ooze.     These  butts, 
some  three  feet  long  and  sixteen  inches  in 
diameter,  were  sold  to  all  comers  at  a  dime. 
The  contractor's  lad  who  carted  twenty  of 
them  to  my  door  justly  demanded  twenty- 
five  cents  for  carrying  them    to  the   back 
fence.     Not   till   I  had   seen   him  blithely 
shoulder  log  after  log  did  it  penetrate  my 
complicated  modern  thought  that  I  might 
have  had  the  pleasure  myself —to  say  noth- 
ing of  the  twenty-five  cents.     At  any  rate, 
the  logs  were  there,  through  sun,  rain,  and 
snow,   the  good   toil   of  leisure  half-hours 
for  months.     Quartering  them  with  wooden 


21 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


wedges  —  they  were  too  big  for  my  light 
hand-axe  —  I  made  my  blood  sing  over  the 
saw-buck.  This  was  well  enough  till  a 
professor  of  Germanic  languages  inquired 
sharply  if  iron  wedges  were  not  cheap  by 
the  pound,  and  further,  if  I  did  not  know 
how  to  dispense  with  wedges  altogether  by 
using  an  axe  of  proper  weight.  Thereupon 
this  learned  man  taught  me  to  tilt  the  stick 
and  deliver  the  single  just  blow.  If  more 
professors  thus  fertilized  learning  with  sa- 
gacity, exercise  would  oftener  be  directly 
productive.  My  fuel,  when  finally  it  was 
piled  to  my  satisfaction,  would  have  brought 
in  the  market  three  times  the  first  cost  of 
the  material,  plus  the  price  of  the  axe  and 
saw.  Must  not  any  American  be  honestly 
glad  that  the  labor  demanded  for  his  body^ 
health  should  directly  serve  his  body^  other 
needs  ? 

The  consideration  is  for  plain  people,  for 
the  host  whose  wage  from  bank  or  college 
or  church  will  not  stretch  to  a  country  club. 
Long  live  sport !  and  may  its  return  to  out- 

22 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


of-doors  never  ebb.  But  beside  the  daily 
need  and  the  large  natural  craving,  sport 
remains  small.  When  it  is  not  for  the  few, 
it  is  still  for  the  time,  not  for  every  day ; 
and  it  leaves  unanswered  the  desire  of  the 
hand  to  be  making.  Enviable  indeed  those 
few  that  have  for  avocation  some  muscu- 
lar craft.  The  next  generation,  thanks  to 
schools  of  manual  training,  is  to  provide 
more  carpenters.  True,  this  resource  can  be 
but  occasional.  That  he  who  earns  with  his 
head  eight  hours  a  day  should  earn  with  his 
hand  one  hour,  however  satisfying  in  theory, 
is  too  exacting  for  practice.  Practically,  the 
daily  misery  of  oscillation  to  and  from  the 
suburbs  may  be  offset  by  delving,  winters  in 
clean  snow,  summers  in  mould.  Only  let  a 
man  plant  beans  as  well  as  roses,  and  learn 
to  make  his  patch  yield.  Even  horses  would 
oftener  be  possible,  in  city  or  country,  and 
with  double  profit  to  muscles  and  lungs,  if 
more  men  would  be  grooms.  In  a  word,  the 
list  of  opportunities  is  far  longer  than  any 
admitted  by  timid  convention.     The  incu- 

23 


NOT  BEATING  THE  AIR 


bus  of  caste  may  be  laughed  away  by  who- 
ever will  view  it  in  daylight  simplicity. 
How  many  free  Americans  will  be  bound 
to  fight  for  health  as  one  that  beateth  the 
air? 


24 


A   Parable  of  America1 


The  yellow  summer  hills  that  hedge  the 
Bay  of  San  Francisco  look  through  the  pass 
of  nations  westward  toward  the  East.  Over 
the  great  new  city,  beyond  the  faint  Faral- 
lones,  they  descry  the  oldest  of  the  human 
old.  Cathay  and  the  way  thither,  the  ro- 
mance of  the  out  isles,  the  hazard  of  ex- 
treme capes,  recur  again  and  again  with 
crusted  funnels  and  sails  of  foreign  flags. 
Cathay,  indeed,  is  here,  flashing  silks  and 
lanterns  in  the  streets,  but  still  aloof,  with 
Buddhist  self-sufficiency  rejecting  the  fret 
of  the  West,  orientally  impenetrable.  But 
Christian  foreigners  have  struck  their  diverse 
roots  into  the  soil.  Their  ships  bring,  and 
take  not  back.  Italian,  Spanish  still,  and 
in  a  better  sense  than  the  invaders  of  our 
Atlantic  coast,  they  are  readily  American. 

i  Much  of  the  detail  of  this  essay  has  been  erased 
by  fire.     May  the  parable  survive  !  _ 

"  25 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


They  gain  America's;  and  America  gains 
theirs.  For  here  the  old  world  touches  the 
new  most  palpably;  and  the  answering 
touch  is  frankest. 

New  York  too  has  China,  has  more  men 
of  Italy  and  Greece  and  all  other  nations 
of  the  inhabited  globe ;  but  her  colonies  are 
less  distinctive  to  the  eye.  Except  to  scru- 
tinizing search,  they  are  lost  in  the  mass, 
their  outwardly  original  erased  by  the  indis- 
criminately human  ebb  and  flow.  The  New 
York  amateur  of  local  color  may  eat  many 
dinners  in  as  many  tongues,  if  he  explore 
out  of  his  way ;  but  a  San  Franciscan  must 
go  out  of  his  way  to  avoid  the  color  that 
is  now  no  less  local  in  the  new  Asti  than  in 
the  old.  As  his  climate  is  preservative  of 
what  it  brings  over  sea,  so  it  calls  him  daily 
to  the  same  out-of-door  life  that  colors  the 
streets  of  Paris  and  Genoa.  The  tobac- 
conists of  San  Francisco,  dispensing  with 
shop  fronts,  open  their  trade  to  the  pave- 
ment. To  dine  in  France  or  Spain  is  too 
obvious  to  be  a  novelty  where  dining  abroad 

26 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


is  habitual,  and  foreign  cooks  are  most 
numerous  as  well  as  best.  Even  at  the 
nooning,  solid  Americans  with  chin -beards 
walk  from  bank  or  exchange  into  Godin's, 
point  out  to  a  waiter  one  salad  among  the 
twenty  displayed  at  the  door,  and  give  to 
a  French  luncheon  the  practiced  apprecia- 
tion it  deserves. 

Perhaps  no  other  metropolitan  district 
of  the  world  has  equal  title  with  the  slopes 
of  Telegraph  Hill  to  the  name  Latin  Quar- 
ter. All  three  great  Romance  nations  live 
there  together  in  American  amity.  The 
cable-car  following  the  long  diagonal  toward 
the  heights  where  American  wealth  over- 
looks the  Golden  Gate,  and  beyond,  where  an 
American  army-post  is  called  the  Presidio, 
passes  on  the  slope  whole  blocks  where  the 
signs  read  as  if  apportioned  equally  among 
French,  Italian,  and  Spanish.  In  the  little 
shop  beside  his  restaurant  Luna  sells  clay 
water-jugs  from  every  province  of  Mexico 
for  the  daily  use  of  the  wise.  Across  the 
way  the  new  Buon  Gusto  disputes  Italian 

27 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


palates  with  the  old.  At  Matthias's,  a  few 
steps  farther,  the  Mexican  waitress  brings 
red  wine  in  a  goblet,  while  you  look  from 
your  tamale  or  enchillada  across  the  way  to 
the  painted  canvas  proclaiming  the  Italian 
marionettes,  a  knight  tilting  in  mail  and 
plume. 

For  not  only  the  picturesqueness  of  Italy, 
green  kerchief  or  yellow  stomacher,  but  also 
the  eloquence  of  her  past,  is  daily  in  the 
eyes  and  ears  of  her  fellow  Americans.  By 
the  door  of  the  stationer  who  supplies  the 
reviews  of  Italy  Mediterranean  and  the 
newspapers  of  Italy  Pacific,  hangs  a  sheaf 
of  ballad  broadsides,  modern  bandits  sold 
with  medieval  lovers  at  three  for  ten  cents. 
Such  astonishing  vitality  has  the  horrid  old 
tale  of  Federico  e  Margherita!  The  dan- 
gler of  marionettes,  dignified  in  conscious 
art,  advances  between  the  acts  in  apron 
and  bare  arms  to  announce  at  what  point 
next  evening's  performance  will  resume  the 
interminable  and  imperishable  romance  of 
/  Paladini    di    Francia.      Warming   from 

28 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


bare  statement,  his  voice  rises  to  romantic 
height,  and  breaks  upon  " avvelenato"  Nor 
does  his  audience  of  little  tradesmen  take 
chivalry  less  seriously.  To  them  the  crash 
of  shining  puppets  in  legendary  battle  has 
nothing  funny.  When  the  dwarfs  swing 
in  to  fight  with  saucepans  and  pot-lids,  ah ! 
that  is  always  so  amusing  after  the  roman- 
tic strain!  And  the  westerner,  who  may 
then  at  last  laugh  doubly,  must  be  dull 
not  to  feel  also  the  thrill  of  a  popular 
tradition,  unbroken  by  the  centuries  and 
the  sea,  which  maintains  the  tiara  of  the 
emperor  and  the  green  cloak  of  the  paynim, 
and  the  little  shrill  boy  for  the  parts  of 
great  dames.  Nay  more,  he  may  well  ask 
himself  if  this  background  of  western  life, 
for  being  imported,  is  any  the  less  his  own. 
The  idea  is  not  startling  to  a  man  whose 
local  history  is  largely  Spanish.  The  trag- 
edy of  Spain,  enacted  by  the  Pacific  as 
by  the  Mediterranean,  gives  to  the  land 
that  longest  and  most  largely  fulfilled 
her  old  dreams  of  the  new  world  an  inde- 


29 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


feasible  historic  dignity.  Beside  this  the 
difference  between  1649  and  1849  is  trivial. 
And,  with  the  sweet  names  by  which  her 
conquerors  love  to  call  hill  and  stream, 
she  has  left  the  tradition  of  elder  generosity 
and  serenity  and  art  in  life.  Even  the 
crasser  American  provincialism,  yielding  in- 
voluntarily to  that  constant  emanation  from 
the  soil,  is  prepared  for  other  lessons  from 
far  away  and  long  ago.  None  the  less 
stable  politically  for  exacting  no  violation 
of  race,  the  state  is  the  richer  artistically. 
While  her  German  vineyards  and  her  Ital- 
ian, her  Swiss  dairies  and  her  Yankee 
fruit-farms,  alike  enrich  the  commonwealth, 
they  give  to  California  life  a  scope  and 
variety  of  background  that  stimulate  at 
once  the  artistic  education  of  the  mass 
and  the  artistic  originality  of  the  individual. 
The  colors  of  China,  the  forms  of  Japan, 
Italian  melody  and  the  port  of  Spain,  could 
hardly  be  woven  by  fiction  as  here  they 
have  been  woven  by  fact.  For  the  incon- 
gruity of  past  with  present  and  race  with 

30 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


race  is  resolved    by  American  assimilation 
and  adaptability. 

The  architecture  of  San  Francisco  re- 
mains insignificant  or  ugly  in  so  far  as  it 
is  the  typical  architecture  of  American 
cities  between  1850  and  1880.  It  always 
arrests,  and  usually  pleases,  the  eye,  wher- 
ever it  has  learned  of  its  own  foreign  people. 
Freedom  of  space  naturally  gives  the  first 
opportunity  in  the  suburbs.  The  aimless 
American  villas  built  at  Oakland  and  San 
Rafael  thirty  years  ago,  and  the  incongru- 
ous New  England  Colonial  of  to-day's 
fashion,  might  be  tolerably  dissimulated 
behind  their  hedges  of  red  geranium,  were 
they  not  stultified  by  the  simple  fitness 
learned  of  Italy  and  Spain.  The  out-of- 
door  climate  appropriates  the  pergola,  and 
permanently  approves  the  Spanish  lines 
adapted  to  California  by  priests  and  ranch- 
ers. These  borrowings  have  been  applied 
already  by  California  architects  with  the 
liveliest  originality.  Against  the  Berkeley 
hills,  gold-tawny   background    in    summer, 

31 


A  PARABLE  OF  AMERICA 


green  in  winter,  are  set  many  houses  that 
convince  the  eye  forthwith  of  American 
capacity  for  creation  through  American 
quickness  to  adapt.  Occasional  freakish- 
ness  in  their  audacity  is  only  another  proof 
of  vigor.  It  refreshes  far  oftener  than  it 
shocks  the  jaded  eye  of  the  East.  And  the 
total  of  lively  impressions  is  a  parable  for 
the  whole  country. 

The  appropriation  and  harmonizing  thus 
seen  in  the  lines  of  structure  as  a  great 
American  opportunity  are  carried  out  still 
more  boldly  in  interior  decoration.  Ameri- 
can susceptibility  to  art  is  at  once  vindi- 
cated and  quickened  by  the  common  use 
of  Japanese  prints,  Chinese  porcelain  and 
brass,  Mexican  clay.  As  all  these  now  be- 
long to  the  soil,  so  all  are  harmonized  by 
the  background  of  native  redwood.  Japan- 
ese flower- vases  are  fit  for  this  other  land 
of  flowers.  Japanese  prints,  doled  out  as 
rarities  in  other  great  centres,  are  here  laid 
in  sheaves  on  the  counters  of  the  American 
Japanese,    and,    being   sold   at   the  normal 


A  PARABLE  OF   AMERICA 


price,  are  possible  even  to  thin  purses.  As 
the  architecture  of  the  second  university  of 
California  for  being  of  the  cloister  is  none 
the  less  collegiate,  and  is  the  more  adapted 
to  the  soil,  so  the  college  student  of  that 
coast,  moved  to  adventure  the  out  isles 
alike  by  audacity  inherited  from  the  pio- 
neers and  by  romance  borrowed  from  the 
past  that  has  come  to  live  with  him,  is 
the  more  typically  American.  The  world 
is  come  to  America,  to  be  taught,  but 
also  to  teach. 


33 


My  Friend  Copperfield 


Unless  the  lakge  new  editions  of  dickens 
are  all  bought  for  the  sitting-rooms  of  the 
vulgar,  time  has  already  proved  his  critics  a 
little  smug.  That  he  is  no  realist  has  not 
for  our  romantic  day  the  import  of  thirty 
years  ago.  And  indeed,  to  insist  that  Dick- 
ens has  no  inkling  of  realism  is  to  blink 
quite  too  many  studies  of  his  in  that  render- 
ing of  life  which  is  the  preoccupation  of  Mr. 
Hardy.  The  thirteenth  chapter  of  David 
Copperfield,  for  example,  has  a  scene  in  the 
very  manner  :  — 

"  '  What  do  you  mean,1  said  the  tinker, 
'by  wearing  my  brother's  silk  handkercher  ? 
Give  it  over  here  ! '  And  he  had  mine  off 
my  neck  in  a  moment,  and  tossed  it  to  the 
woman. 

"  The  woman  burst  into  a  fit  of  laughter, 
as  if  she  thought  this  a  joke,  and  tossed  it 
back  to  me,  nodded  once,  as  slightly  as  be- 

34, 


MY  FRIEND  COPPERFIELD 


fore,  and  made  the  word  '  Go  ! '  with  her 
lips.  Before  I  could  obey,  however,  the 
tinker  seized  the  handkerchief  out  of  my 
hand  with  a  roughness  that  threw  me  away 
like  a  feather,  and  putting  it  loosely  round 
his  own  neck,  turned  upon  the  woman  with 
an  oath  and  knocked  her  down.  I  never 
shall  forget  seeing  her  fall  backward  on  the 
hard  road,  and  lie  there  with  her  bonnet 
tumbled  off,  and  her  hair  all  whitened  in 
the  dust ;  nor,  when  I  looked  back  from  a 
distance,  seeing  her  sitting  on  the  pathway, 
which  was  a  bank  by  the  roadside,  wiping 
the  blood  from  her  face  with  the  corner  of 
her  shawl,  while  he  went  on  ahead." 

But  that  dust  and  blood  are  demonstrably 
of  the  accident  of  Dickens,  not  of  the  sub- 
stance. Blunderstone  is  said  to  be  in  Suf- 
folk ;  it  might  be  in  Yorkshire,  where  the 
Squeers  set,  for  all  their  jargon,  are  not  at 
home.  The  Yarmouth  fisher  folk  are  stage 
properties.  Barring  a  few  pieces  of  amazing 
verity,  Dickens  has  no  local  truth.  His 
London  is  a  city  of  dreams.     The  glamor 


35 


MY  FRIEND  COPPERFIELD 


on  his  descriptions  —  are  any  more  effective  ? 
—  is  what  Ruskin,  with  a  nice  perversion  of 
language,  calls  the  pathetic  fallacy.  As  the 
very  watch  of  Uriah  Heep  has  a  "  pale,  inex- 
pressive face,11  so  in  the  haunting  melancholy 
of  the  many  broodings  over  Thames  every 
physical  detail  is  warped  to  the  preconceived 
harmony. 

In  most  of  his  characters,  again,  Dickens 
is  even  further  from  realism.  Yet  it  is  un- 
critical to  label  them  all  grotesques.  The 
truth  of  his  best  characterization  seems  none 
the  less  secure  for  not  being  truth  of  realism. 
That  gallery  of  vague  and  vulgar  heroines 
has  yet  the  distinct  and  noble  sketch  of 
Agnes  Wickfield.  And,  not  to  insist  on 
Betsey  Trotwood,  Micawber  is  what  we 
agree  to  call  a  creation.  Few  men  of  fiction 
are  more  essentially  human  than  that  spring 
of  hopeful  grandiloquence.  If  the  exposure 
of  Heep  is  melodrama,  what  comedy  is  nearer 
humanity  than  Micawber's  thrusting  of  the 
fork  into  his  shirt  front,  when  the  untimely 
arrival    of   Littimer    chilled    the    feast    in 

36 


MY  FRIEND  COPPERFIELD 


David's  chambers  ?  That,  indeed,  is  a 
scene  of  half-domestic  conviviality,  and  in 
the  presentation  of  domestic  happiness,  as 
a  bourgeois  appanage  including  good  cheer, 
the  truth  of  Dickens  has  never  been  much 
contested  ;  but  to  say  that  the  Christmas 
stories  are  therefore  greater  than  the  novels 
is  to  proceed  upon  a  false  assumption.  The 
stories  are  not  superior  in  accuracy,  in  truth 
of  detail.  That  kind  of  truth  may  be  found 
here  and  there,  in  the  novels  as  often  as 
in  the  stories ;  but  in  either  it  is  so  far 
from  being  typical  that  it  is  obviously  ex- 
ceptional. What  animates  the  Christmas 
stories  is  the  feeling  for  good  cheer,  the 
feeling  for  homely  joys,  the  feeling  for 
homely  pathos.  And  always  the  truth  of 
Dickens  is  a  sentimental  truth.  When,  at 
his  best,  he  realizes  character,  it  is  through 
imaginative  grasp  of  feeling ;  when,  in  his 
inferior  studies,  he  fails  in  character,  it  is 
through  falsity  of  feeling.  Mr.  Peggotty's 
wandering  search  for  his  niece  is  a  situation 
common  enough  on  the  provincial  stage.     In 

37 


MY  FRIEND  COPPERFIELD 


detail,  in  fact,  it  is  false ;  but  Dickens  makes 
it  pathetically  true.  The  truth  of  Dickens, 
maintained  with  inalienable  affection  by  the 
people  that  read  novels,  is  truth  of  emotion. 
This  is  bringing  Dickens  into  great  com- 
pany, the  company  of  Victor  Hugo,  the 
company  —  may  her  other  friends  be  for  a 
moment  civil  to  the  cockney  intruder  —  of 
Charlotte  Bronte.  Find  in  Notre  Dame  a 
single  piece  of  actuality.  Yet  the  heart 
answers.  And  the  two  English  novelists, 
essentially  different  in  quality  of  emotion, 
are  yet  essentially  alike  in  that  emotion 
defines  the  range  of  their  powers.  Beyond 
that  they  are  both  at  fault.  Dickens,  in- 
deed, had  singular  opportunities  to  know 
the  facts  of  a  certain  limited  range  of  life ; 
but  his  presentation  of  facts  even  within 
that  limited  range  is  highly,  sometimes 
falsely  colored,  and  always  devoted,  as  has 
been  said  often  enough,  to  the  extraordinary 
and  the  picturesque  rather  than  to  any  con- 
sistent rendering  of  the  normal.  Charlotte 
Bronte  knew  the  facts  of  life  as  little  as  any 

38 


MY  FRIEND  COPPERFIELD 


novelist  that  ever  lived.  No  doubt  she  had 
common-sense,  and  could  conduct  a  house- 
hold ;  none  the  less  for  that,  her  ignorance 
of  the  actual  life  of  men  and  women  is  even 
ludicrous.  Thus,  far  more  than  Dickens, 
but  in  the  same  manner,  she  prevails  by 
imaginative  grasp  of  emotion,  as  Victor 
Hugo  prevails.  Far  more  than  Dickens ; 
for  she  had  not  only  less  knowledge,  but 
higher  imagination.  As  if  to  point  the  dis- 
tinction, she  has  no  humor,  whereas  it  is 
commonplace  that  Dickens  is  among  the 
great  humorists.  It  is  in  his  humorous 
situations,  eminently,  that  Dickens  brings 
to  bear  such  experience  as  he  has ;  it  is  in 
her  lack  of  humor,  eminently,  that  Charlotte 
Bronte  reveals  the  slightness  of  her  hold  on 
real  life.  There  is  the  contrast ;  but  it  is  a 
difference  between  geniuses  essentially  akin. 
The  power  of  both  is  a  poetic  power.  Char- 
lotte Bronte's  is  a  higher  and  especially  a 
purer  poetry ;  but  Charles  Dickens,  cockney 
or  not,  had  his  poetry,  too. 


Master  Vergil 


Jr  OR    TRAVELLING    COMPANY    MOST    BOOKS,  LIKE 

most  people,  are  too  exacting.  They  will 
not  yield  to  a  mood ;  they  will  be  asserting 
themselves  against  us,  or  tugging  us  aside. 
And  why  travel,  especially  afoot,  if  one  can- 
not be  lord  of  his  day  ?  Therefore,  because 
it  is  serenely  complaisant,  trust  the  paler  al- 
lurement of  pure  art.  Take  with  you  some 
fair  book  not  human  enough  to  challenge 
you  on  your  road.  Marion  Lescaut  has  the 
simplicity  of  perfect  breeding,  a  lovely  purity 
of  style  for  no  considerable  matter.  Or  take 
The  Sentimental  Journey,  if  you  have  forgot- 
ten who  wrote  it.  But  I  will  always  take  the 
epic  of  travel,  the  JEneid. 

It  may  be  the  foredoom  of  artificial  epic 
that  it  should  live,  if  at  all,  by  style  alone. 
That  all  literature  lives  by  style  is  a  plati- 
tude ;  but  in  the  JEneid  the  import  of  the 
matter  was  so  thin  at  first  that  it  has  long 

40 


MASTER  VERGIL 


been  threadbare.  If  the  Paradise  Lost  was 
ever  a  moulding  moral  force,  it  is  probably 
that  no  longer.  The  epic  of  rebellion  against 
a  doctrinaire  God  touches  our  time  only  in 
so  far  as  its  cold  heresy  is  lost  in  its  high 
beauty.  Vergil's  gods  were  from  the  begin- 
ning purely  ex  machina  ;  his  hero  is  alien  to 
us ;  but  no  verse,  unless  it  be  Milton's,  wins 
the  ear  more  masterfully.  No  wonder  it 
seemed  to  the  Middle  Age  an  incantation. 

The  purely  artistic  pleasure  in  art  is  given 
by  the  Mneid  undisturbed.  Homer  is  hu- 
man, giving  a  pleasure  as  of  realism,  and 
now  and  again  searching  the  heart ;  Vergil, 
where  he  is  human  at  all,  is  so  romantically, 
as  in  the  poignant  fourth  book.  Habitually 
he  moves  but  splendid  shadows  in  armor 
through  a  colored  landscape. 

.  .  .  splendet  tremulo  sub  lumine  pontus. 

This  soothing  of  our  souls  is  not  disturbed 
by  the  unreal  cares  of  the  unreal  ^Eneas. 
When  the  ships  are  scattered  in  that  mag- 
nificently theatrical  storm,  and  the  warriors, 

41 


MASTER  VERGIL 


cast  dripping  on  the  beach,  instead  of  cook- 
ing plain  food  over  a  fire  of  sticks, 

.  .  .  arida  circum 
Nutrimenta  dedit,  rapuitque  in  fomite  flammam. 
Turn  Cererem  corruptam  undis  Cerealiaque  arma 
Expediunt  fessi  rerum ; 

we  have   already   forgotten    them   for   the 
scenery :  — 

Est  in  secessu  longo  locus  :  insula  portum 
Efficit  objectu  laterum,  quibus  omnis  ab  alto 
Frangitur  inque  sinus  scindit  sese  unda  reductos. 
Hinc  atque  hinc  vastae  rapes  geminique  minantui 
In  coelum  scopuli,  quorum  sub  vertice  late 
Aequora  tuta  silent ;  turn  silvis  scena  corascis 
Desuper,  horrentique  atram  nemus  iraminet  umbra. 
Fronte  sub  adversa  scopulis  pendentibus  antrum  ; 
Intus  aquae  dulces,  vivoque  sedilia  saxo  : 

Was    ever    finer    harmony   of    sound    and 
form  ? 

And  see  how  alien  the  hero  is  from  us 
when  for  rare  moments  we  are  troubled  by 
a  transpiring  of  personality,  and  how  little 
he  means  to  us  as  a  personality  in  the  sum 
of  the  whole.     For  this  the  crux  is  the  epi- 

42 


MASTER  VERGIL 


sode  of  Dido,  surely  the  greatest  book  of  all, 
the  most  cogently  artistic  in  narrative,  the 
most  glowing  in  figure,  the  most  remarkable 
in  verse.  Dido  is  a  woman.  Has  Vergil 
another  ?  Beside  this  passionate  creation 
set  in  high  romance  the  pious  ^Eneas  for  a 
space  becomes  real  enough  to  be  despised; 
then,  as  he  slinks  off  behind  the  divine  will, 
lapses  again  into  armor  speaking  platitude. 
Doubtless  this  impression  is  due  in  part  to 
race.  The  Latin  hero  leaves  us  wondering 
and  cold,  is  not  to  us  heroic.  The  Southern 
nations  seem  to  keep  a  different  standard  of 
heroic  love,  to  value  ardor  more  than  the 
Northern  constancy,  and  withal  to  be  more 
demonstrative  of  feeling  in  speech  than  is 
found  by  us  of  the  North  consistent  with 
heroic  strength.  Chaucer,  whose  Cressid  is 
one  of  the  most  human  figures  in  fiction,  can 
make  little  of  Troilus.  Only  Shakespeare 
has  leaped  this  barrier ;  and  has  not  even  he 
a  little  Germanized  his  Latins,  as  Wagner 
has  Germanized  Tristram  ?  But  allowing 
that  to  Vergil's  Romans  and  their  descend- 

43 


MASTER  VERGIL 


ants  iEneas  has  been  more  nearly  than  to  us 
a  man  and  a  hero,  can  we  suppose  that  he 
has  ever  seemed  to  any  one  a  moving  per- 
sonality ?  At  least  the  distinctive  power  of 
the  Mneid  is  not  here. 

Except  for  Dido,  what  humanly  reaches 
our  sympathies  now  and  again  is  something 
incidental,  —  almost,  it  would  appear,  acci- 
dental. The  mother  of  Euryalus  in  the 
midst  of  her  wild  grief  lamenting  that  she 
cannot  shroud  his  body  with  the  coat  that 
had  been  taxing  her  aged  hands  ;  the  affec- 
tion of  Mazentius  for  his  horse  Nisus  and 
Euryalus  talking  low  on  the  camp  wall ;  the 
old  Evander's  thought  of  his  dead  wife  — 
Felix  morte  tua,  neque  in  hunc  servata  dolo- 
rem  —  beside  the  bier  of  his  son  ;  the  mere 
illustrative  figure  of  the  house- wife  weaving 
before  dawn,  — 

.  .  .  castum  ut  servare  cubile 
Conjugis,  et  possit  parvos  educere  natos  ;  — 

the  stuff  of  the  Mneid  is  not  these,  but 
Laocoon  in  agony,  the  descent  of  Mercury, 

44 


MASTER  VERGIL 


the  figures  as  sun  on  brass,  more  splendid 
than  any  others  ever  strung  on  so  thin  a 
thread  of  fable.  Vergil  sings  arms,  the  sea 
and  shore,  dawn  and  moonlight,  but  not  the 
man. 

This  typical  absence  of  human  appeal 
leaves  free  the  enjoyment  of  the  iEneid  as  a 
supreme  work  of  artifice.  It  is  a  pleasure 
faint,  doubtless,  to  most  men,  but  un- 
troubled, art  for  the  sake  of  art.  The  just 
word  charged  with  suggestion  and  not  sur- 
charged — 

.  .  .  lucet  via  longo 
Ordine  flammarum,  et  late  discriminat  agros  — 

the  elaborate  cunning  of  the  sentences,  each 
a  pattern  of  rhetoric  and  prosody,  suit  well 
the  glittering  pomp,  the  unrelaxed  etiquette. 
The  methods  of  the  most  elaborate,  the 
most  highly  colored,  of  the  great  poets,  are 
so  manifest  as  to  appoint  him  perpetual 
teacher.  Just  because  his  habit  is  so  far 
from  the  inimitable  simplicity  of  Homer, 
Vergil  is  the  master  of  poets.     And  as  the 

45 


MASTER  VERGIL 


master  of  poets,  so  the  gentle  companion  of 
those  whose  journeys  must  be  far  lower  and 
more  literal  than  Dante's.  For  solace  as  for 
study  it  is  always  safe  to  embark  upon  his 
sounding  line. 


46 


The    Literary   Influence    of 
Sterne  in  France 


The  influence  of  "tristram  shandy"  on 
French  writers  of  its  time,  first  hinted  by 
M.  Joseph  Texte,1  is  one  of  those  unaccom- 
modating facts  of  literary  history  which 
warn  critics  against  a  priori  reasoning.  On 
the  face  of  it,  the  book  that  should  have 
kindled  French  writers  is  the  Sentimental 
Journey.  This  is  so  obvious  that  it  has 
been  either  taken  for  granted  or  asserted 
on  quite  insufficient  evidence.  How  the 
French  could  miss  an  art  so  appropriate  to 
themselves  as  that  of  the  Sentimental  Jour- 
ney we  may  well  wonder;  but  in  fact  even 
the  first  French  translation  does  miss  its 
distinctive   artistic   traits;    and  apparently 

*  Jean  Jacques  Rousseau  et  les  origines  du  cosmo- 
politisme  litUraire,  etc. ,  par  Joseph  Texte  :  Paris, 
1895. 

47 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

the  ojaly  French  critic  to  express  adequately 
these  distinctive  traits,  the  difference  in  art 
between  Tristram  and  the  Journey,  is  M. 
]£mile  Montegut.1 

Evidently  there  is  need  of  some  agree- 
ment as  to  what  the  characteristics  of  Sterne 
are  in  general,  what  habits  of  his  expression 
might  be  supposed  to  have  influence,  and 
secondly,  as  to  what  separate  characteristics 
shall  be  assigned  to  the  Sentimental  Journey, 
Sentimentality  is  easily  set  down  first  as  the 
mark  of  all  Sterne's  work.  "He  parades 
his  soul,"  as  has  been  wittily  said  by  M. 
Texte.2  But  so,  notoriously,  does  Rousseau  ; 
and  how  shall  we  disengage  clearly  the  in- 
fluence of  this  sentimentality  from  that  of 
Richardson,  whose  hold  on  France  had  a 
tenacity  little  short  of  amazing?  If  we 
differentiate  it  by  its  objects,  by  its  dithy- 
rambs over  dead  asses  and  its  moralities 
upon  starlings,  we  find  very  little  until  the 
time  is  so  late  that  we  cannot  be  sure.     The 

1  Essais  sur  la  literature  anglaise,  "  Sterne." 

2  Jean  Jacques  Rousseau,  etc.,  page  351. 

48 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

imitation  by  Mile,  de  Lespinasse  in  her 
story  of  Mme.  Geoffrin's  milkmaid,  not  only 
seems  too  slight  for  more  than  mention, 
but,  even  if  it  had  much  greater  literary 
importance  of  its  own,  would  show  at  most 
only  the  vogue  of  Sterne's  sentimentality. 
"  To  be  moved  at  the  right  time,"  says  M. 
Texte,  "and  even  at  the  wrong  time,  with 
never  a  blush  for  ft, —  this  is  the  whole 
secret  of  Sterne."1  Surely  not.  If  that 
were  the  whole  secret  of  Sterne,  the  Senti- 
mental Journey  would  have  been  buried 
long  ago.  I  fear  the  French  critics  in 
tracking  this  particular  sentimentality  are 
sometimes  at  fault;  but  even  supposing 
them  to  be  infallible,  something  more  and 
something  more  definite  is  needed  to  con- 
stitute a  literary  influence. 

There  is  safer  ground  in  Sterne's  humor, 
in  his  pervasive  equivocation,  in  the  charac- 
ter of  his  incidental  creations — Mr.  Shandy, 
Corporal  Trim,  Uncle  Toby.    Safest  measure 

i  Page  350. 

4  49 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

of  all  is  Sterne's  form  —  his  constant  use  of 
gesture,  his  random  progress,  his  method, 
conversational  and  expository  rather  than 
narrative,  narrative,  indeed,  only  so  far  as 
to  fool  his  readers.  This  is  the  "ceuvre  de- 
cousue"  of  which  M.  Texte  speaks,  "sans 
plan,  sans  ordre? 1  This  is  Sterne,  or  rather 
this  is  the  effect  that  Sterne  sought  and 
achieved  ;  but  even  this  is  not  all  Sterne, 
for  it  is  not  yet  the  Sentimental  Journey. 
The  Shandy  style  does  recur  in  the  Journey, 
but  only  as  the  incorrigible  trickery  of  a 
man  who  has  found  his  art.  Instead  of  the 
mad  breaks  and  the  elaborate  digression  of 
Shandy,  the  Journey  has  transitions  of  con- 
summate delicacy.  The  Shandy  passages  of 
description  are  only  hints  of  Sterne's  skill  in 
miniature.  The  Journey,  as  M.  Montegut 
points  out,  is  a  Dutch  painting  of  French 
manners.  It  is  much  more  ;  it  is  the  art  of 
pure  description  at  its  finest.  Nothing,  I 
venture  to  think,  has  ever  surpassed  the  con- 

l  Pages  351,  353. 

•    50 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

centration,  the  brilliancy,  and  the  delicacy 
of  these  tiny  chapters,  where  there  is  not  a 
word  too  much  and  not  a  word  amiss.  In 
a  literature  not  habitually  tolerant  of  de- 
scription, and  swinging  from  the  large,  long 
landscape  style  to  the  large,  short  poster 
style,  these  pictures  of  Sterne's  are  almost 
alone. 

For  observe  that  the  Sentimental  Journey, 
though  it  is  beautifully  coherent,  is  hardly 
more  than  Tristram  Shandy  narrative.  It 
has  no  narrative  unity ;  it  has  very  little 
narrative  progress.  Sterne  has  narrative 
incidents,  narrative  digressions,  even  in 
Shandy ;  but  he  never  has  as  his  object  the 
conduct  of  a  story.  Call  him,  if  you  will,  a 
novelist  —  I  will  not  quarrel  over  a  word  ; 
but  remember  that  he  is  not  even,  except  by 
the  way,  a  story-teller.  If  we  call  Tristram 
Shandy  story  because  of  Uncle  Toby,  we 
may  almost  as  well  call  the  Spectator  story 
because  of  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley.  In  Tris- 
tram Shandy  Sterne  is  a  whimsical,  satirical 
essayist  romping  in  narrative  forms ;  in  the 

51 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

Sentimental  Journey  he  is  much  more  a  de- 
scriber  of  men  and  women,  seeking  descrip- 
tion only,  and  for  itself,  and  coloring  it 
habitually  with  drama. 

Dramatic  description,  if  a  label  be  desired, 
might  well  be  pasted  on  the  Sentimental 
Journey,  The  book  is  full  of  situations, 
but  situations  that  lead  nowhither,  that  are 
there  merely  for  themselves.  The  snuff-box, 
the  desobligeante,  the  gloves,  the  theatre 
passage  —  no  wonder  it  has  been  a  prize  for 
the  illustrators,  though  "indeed  there  was 
no  need." 

"  I  looked  at  Monsieur  Dessein  through  and 
through ;  eyed  him  as  he  walked  along  in  pro- 
file—  then  en  face  —  thought  him  like  a  Jew 
—  then  a  Turk  —  disliked  his  wig  —  cursed 
him  by  my  gods  —  wished  him  at  the  devil  — 

"  —  And  is  all  this  to  be  lighted  up  in  the 
heart  for  a  beggarly  account  of  three  or  four 
louis  d'ors,  which  is  the  most  I  can  be  over- 
reached in  ?  — e  Base  passion  ! '  said  I,  turning 
myself  about  as  a  man  naturally  does  upon  a 
sudden  reverse  of  sentiment ;  '  Base,  ungentle 

52 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

passion  !  thy  hand  is  against  every  man,  and 
every  man's  hand  against  thee.'  '  Heaven  for- 
bid ! '  said  she,  raising  her  hand  up  to  her 
forehead  ;  for  I  had  turned  full  in  front  upon 
the  lady  whom  I  had  seen  in  conversation  with 
the  monk  :  she  had  followed  us  unperceived. 
c  Heaven  forbid,  indeed  ! '  said  I,  offering  her 
my  own  —  she  had  a  black  pair  of  silk  gloves, 
open  only  at  the  thumb  and  two  forefingers  — 
so  accepted  it  without  reserve,  and  I  led  her 
up  to  the  door  of  the  remise." 

The  conclusion  of  these  differences  is  that 
Tristram  Shandy  is  trick  ;  the  Sentimental 
Journey  is  art. 

With  the  essential  traits  of  Sterne  in 
mind,  general  and  particular,  it  is  easy  to 
dispose  of  some  minor  claims  to  his  influence 
on  French  literature.  Saintine's  Picciola, 
says  Mr.  Lee  in  the  Dictionary  of  National 
Biography,  acknowledges  a  debt  to  Sterne. 
Of  this  acknowledgment  one  must  say  that 
it  is  the  more  generous  since  without  it  the 
debt  would  never  have  been  suspected.  Pic- 
ciola  was  written  in  1836,  published  in  184S. 

53 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

It  is  essentially  what  Sterne  is  not  at  all, 
romantic.  This  appears  not  only  in  the 
large  use  of  natural  scenery  and  in  the  re- 
markable coincidences  of  the  action,  but 
especially  in  the  Byronic  hero.  Indeed,  if 
we  must  derive  Picciola,  let  us  look  rather 
to  the  Prisoner  of  Chillon.  There  is  none 
of  the  Sterne  wit,  none  of  the  Sterne  form, 
and,  since  the  emotion  throughout  is  deeper 
and  more  human,  none  of  the  Sterne  tone. 
The  main  idea  —  the  misanthropic  philoso- 
pher brought  by  adversity  and  by  affection 
for  the  sole  plant  in  his  prison -yard  to  faith, 
resignation,  and  domestic  love  —  is  utterly 
foreign  to  Sterne.  Even  the  sentimental 
dilation  over  the  plant  is  not  in  the  Sterne 
key  ;  it  is  too  deep  and  too  sincere.  The 
only  resemblance  is  in  the  dominance  of 
emotion  as  ruling  motive  and  trusty  guide. 
Who  would  venture  to  assign  that  to 
Sterne  ? 

It  is  even  easier  to  reject  La  bibliotheque 
de  mem  oncle.  Again  there  is  an  essential 
difference  in  both  degree  and  kind.     Sterne 

54 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

was  as  insensible  to  the  schwdrmerei  of  youth 
as  to  the  happiness  of  domestic  love.  The 
dutiful  propriety  of  Topffer's  Henriette  or 
Lucy  he  could  not  have  appreciated,  except, 
perhaps,  as  motive  for  an  equivocal  sarcasm. 
If  the  affectionate  whimsicality  of  Uncle 
Tom  should  suggest  Uncle  Toby,  if  a  rustic 
scene  has  a  hint  of  a  similar  one  in  Tristram 
Shandy,  it  requires  an  abnormal  taste  for 
derivation  to  magnify  these  into  echoes. 
They  seem  infinitely  more  likely  to  have 
come  from  life  or  from  Topffer's  own  fancy. 
What  is  much  more  to  the  point,  the  form 
of  meandering  reflection  has  but  slight  claim, 
certainly  not  enough  to  establish,  or  even 
plausibly  to  suggest,  a  connection. 

What  the  critics  had  in  mind  who  sug- 
gested Sterne  in  connection  with  Saintine  or 
TopfFer  seems  to  have  been  nothing  more 
than  reminiscence.  Even  reminiscence  is 
hardly  visible  in  these  books ;  but  it  does 
appear  here  and  there  in  unexpected  places. 
Are  such  cases  of  deliberate  borrowing  what 
we  mean  by  literary  influence  ?     They  show 

55 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

that  Sterne  was  still  read;  they  show  that 
French  men  of  letters  found  their  account 
in  Tristram,  not  in  the  Journey ;  and  they 
show  nothing  more.  Goethe  said  once  to 
Eckermann,  anent  the  tiresome  cry  of  pla- 
giarism (I  paraphrase  from  memory),  "  You 
might  as  well  ask  a  well  fed  man  to  give 
account  of  the  oxen,  sheep,  and  hogs  which 
he  has  eaten  and  which  have  passed  into  his 
blood."  Did  Dumas  even  take  a  whole  plot 
from  an  author  that  had  failed  to  handle  it  ? 
That  is  an  interesting  fact  in  the  life  of 
Dumas ;  it  is  a  comparatively  uninteresting 
fact  in  the  history  of  literature,  as  we  all 
know  from  many  futile  studies  of  so-and-so's 
indebtedness  to  so-and-so.  It  is  not  literary 
influence.  It  does  not  affect  the  forms  of 
art. 

And  so  one  searches  Diderot's  Jacques  le 
fataliste  with  misgiving,  because  the  critics 
have  pointed  out  that  it  opens  with  a  pas- 
sage from  Tristram  Shandy,  that  it  has 
toward  the  end  a  scene  very  similar  to  one 
in  the  Sentimental  Journey,  and  that  in  at 

56 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

least  one  other  place  Diderot  borrows  from 
Sterne.  Here,  however,  is  much  more  than 
borrowing.  Here  is  imitation,  and  imitation 
consistent  enough  to  pique  inquiry  into  its 
limits  and  character.  At  first  the  imitation 
seems  too  consistent;  it  looks  like  a  mere 
paraphrase  of  Shandy,  as  in  fact  it  has  been 
called.  Here  are  the  Shandy  dialogue,  which 
Diderot  prints  like  a  play;  the  Shandy 
pauses,  digressions,  wheels  within  wheels,  in- 
terpolations by  the  author  to  tease  the 
reader,  dialogue  between  author  and  reader. 
Here,  occasionally  and  for  satire,  is  even  the 
elaboration  of  gesture,  as  in  the  master's  re- 
peated taking  of  snuff  and  looking  at  his 
watch.  In  short,  Diderot  has  tried  most  of 
Sterne's  narrative  gymnastics.  Superficially, 
Jacques  le  fataliste  is  a  French  Tristram 
Shandy. 

The  Shandy  style  naturally  pleased  a 
mind  of  Diderot's  superabundance.  It  gave 
free  rein  to  philosophizing  on  everything 
and  nothing.  For  Jacques  is  the  work  of 
a   burning    mind,    throwing   off   sparks  fit 

57 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

to  kindle  a  score  of  stories.  If  Sterne's 
method  was  the  pleasure  of  Sterne's  fancy, 
it  was  for  Diderot  rather  a  vent  for  his 
prodigious  fertility.  He  absorbed  like  a 
glutton  ;  but  he  wrote  always.  It  has  been 
said  of  him  that  he  cared  only  to  write ; 
to  publish  was  a  minor  consideration. 
Jacques  shows  him  writing  what  he  chose, 
as,  at  the  moment,  he  chose,  without  stint, 
without  husbandry.  The  book  is  a  quarry 
for  any  romancer  that  has  Diderot's  scent 
for  suggestion  in  the  work  of  others. 

But,  after  all,  Jacques  le  fataliste  has 
greater  consistency  of  form  than  Tristram 
Shandy,  and  after  all,  a  strong  sense  of 
narrative.  True,  the  freakish  progress  of 
Shandy  is  adopted  in  toto.  The  postpone- 
ment of  Tristram's  birth  and  then  of  his 
breeching  has  its  parallel  in  the  story  of  the 
amours  of  Jacques,  announced  in  the  earlier 
part,  consistently  interrupted  at  every  stage, 
sometimes  at  half-stages  or  even  half-sen- 
tences, by  the  other  tales  that  make  the 
bulk  of  the    volume,  and    finished   never. 


58 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

But  there  is  much  more  narrative  in 
Jacques.  The  separate  stories  are  more 
numerous,  and,  in  general,  more  developed, 
and  the  interpolation  of  essay  and  dia- 
logue, though  frequent,  is  a  far  smaller 
fraction   of  the  whole. 

Besides,  though  Goethe's  praise  of  the 
whole  as  a  "chef  d'ceuvre"  seems  extrava- 
gant, the  threads  are  dropped  and  picked 
up,  if  not  in  a  fixed  order,  at  any  rate 
with  much  more  regularity  than  in  Tris- 
tram. And  not  only  is  there  a  great  deal 
of  mere  "  yam "  of  the  Yankee  sort  told  one 
to  cap  another,  but  Jacques  the  valet  has 
more  than  a  suggestion  of  the  valet  pica- 
resque. There  are  decidedly  picaresque  ad- 
ventures; and  though  these  are  sometimes 
interrupted  by  the  author's  satirical  "  Now 
I  might  make  them  do  so-and-so,  or  so-and- 
so,"  Diderot  gives  some  value  to  the  ad- 
venture as  such.  In  Sterne  the  incidental 
adventure  counts  almost  as  little  as  the 
whole  fable. 

Diderot's  narrative  interest  and  narrative 


59 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

force  are  best  exhibited  in  the  episode  of 
the  landlady's  tale  of  Mme.  de  Pommeraye. 
Schiller  translated  this  into  German,  and 
it  has  been  selected  since  for  separate  pub- 
lication. No  wonder.  It  is  not  only  pure 
narrative,  slightly  interrupted;  it  is  narra- 
tive of  the  highest  order;  it  is,  at  the  end 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  a  short  story 
done  with  nineteenth-century  French  art. 
Here  is  no  hop-skip-and-jump,  but  a  strong 
plot  well  complicated  and  brought  to  a 
striking  solution  of  character.  It  may  be 
said  that  the  denouement  is  not  satisfying, 
not  consequent  on  the  character  of  one  of 
the  actors;  in  fact,  Diderot  acknowledges 
this  by  appending  a  clumsy  explanation ; 
but  observe  that  the  objection  presupposes 
plot  and  character.  This  otherwise  admi- 
rable narrative  occupies  one-fourth  of  the 
book. 

The  story  of  Mme.  de  Pommeraye  points 
a  contrast  also  in  tone.  It  deals  with 
passion,  and  passion  is  unknown  to  Sterne. 
His   emotion   is   sentimental,   and    of    this 


60 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 


Diderot  has  hardly  a  trace.  There  is,  to  be 
sure,  the  touching  incident  of  the  woman 
with  the  broken  jug ;  but  the  beaten  horse 
inspires  no  sentiment,  and  it  is  possible 
that  this  incident,  like  that  of  the  land- 
lady's pet  dog,  is  meant  as  satire  on 
Sterne. 

Still  more  strikingly  different  is  the  tone 
of  the  satire  in  general.  Diderot  catches 
some  of  the  Sterne  wit,  and  he  has  some 
dialogue  of  delicate  cynicism ;  but  there  are 
no  asides  so  fanciful  as  Mr.  Shandy's  dis- 
quisition on  the  irregular  verbs,  and  in 
general  the  essay-dialogue  parts  have  more 
substance  and  seriousness  than  Sterne's. 
The  moralizing  is  often  rather  deep;  the 
satire,  often  serious,  always  hits  harder,  and 
is  sometimes  bitter  to  virulence.  The 
clergy,  in  particular,  are  pursued  with  in- 
tent to  kill.  It  is  not  merely  sneer  and 
jeer,  but  open  and  foul  abuse.  The  hatred 
of  the  cloth  is  so  uncontrolled  as  quite 
to  o'erleap  itself.  The  artist  is  lost  in 
the  revolutionist.     There   is    none   of    this 


61 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

animus  in  Sterne,  whose  game  was  always 
to  trifle.  Diderot,  though  he  has  some 
pleasant  trifling,  was  anything  but  a 
trifler. 

That  Sterne,  for  all  his  trifling,  created 
a  few  characters  far  more  distinct  and 
human  than  even  Mme.  de  Pommeraye  will 
be  accepted  without  elaboration,  and  is  the 
most  marked  difference.  In  the  matter  of 
morality  Sterne  is  despicable  and  Diderot 
is  outrageous.  With  these  characteristic 
differences,  then,  Jacques  le  fataliste  is  an 
imitation  of  Tristram  Shandy,  an  imita- 
tion not  of  the  tone,  but  of  the  method 
and  manner;  only  there  is  somewhat  more 
method  and  much  less  manner.  Of  the 
Sentimental  Journey  there  is  nothing.  The 
possible  connection  of  one  of  the  closing 
scenes  with  a  similar  scene  notorious  in 
the  Journey  is  hardly  worth  mentioning. 
In  spite  of  its  mimic  pranks,  Jacques  is 
story  ;  and  if  Tristram  Shandy  is  not  story, 
much  less  is  the  Sentimental  Journey. 

Many  years  later   another  French   story- 

62 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

writer  evidently  lingered  over  his  Sterne  be- 
cause of  a  preoccupation,  very  like  Sterne's, 
with  the  finer  art  of  description.  Here  surely 
the  Sentimental  Journey  should  have  borne 
fruit.  But  Theophile  Gautier  saw  not  so 
much  men  and  women  and  their  drama  of 
attitude  and  gesture  as  gorgeous  hangings 
and  outlandish  scenery.  He  indulges  ex- 
travagantly in  furniture  and  dressmaking 
where  Sterne  passes  with  a  hint,  like  the 
black  silk  gloves  at  Calais  or  the  waiting- 
maid's  purse.  He  riots  in  color  and  light, 
and  Sterne  manages  wonderfully  in  his 
Journey  with  very  little  of  either.  Still, 
that  Gautier  remembered  Sterne  seems  evi- 
dent in  Fortunio.  Without  listening  for 
more  than  an  echo,  read  the  opening  and 
the  close  of  Chapter  in  in  Fortunio,  and 
then  the  whole  of  Chapter  v.  Is  it  not  an 
echo,  but  an  echo  of  Tristram  Shandy  ? 

Are  there  no  French  children,  then,  of  the 
Sentimental  Journey  f  There  is  at  least  one 
child.  It  is  hard  to  mistake  the  parentage 
of  Xavier  de  Maistre's  Voyage  autour  de  ma 

63 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

chambre.1  And  let  me  say  at  once  that  I 
lay  no  stress  on  the  eloquent  tear  dropped 
in  Chapter  xvm,  and  noted  for  Sterne's  by 
Sainte-Beuve.2  That  tear,  and  the  repent- 
ance in  Chapter  xxvm,  may  be  drawn  from 
Sterne's  reservoir,  or  they  may  be  a  coinci- 
dence. Mere  borrowing,  as  I  have  urged, 
means  very  little ;  and  Maistre  frankly  rec- 
ognizes Sterne,  even  alludes  to  him  as  of 
course  familiar  to  his  readers.  "  Cest  le  dada 
de  mon  oncle  Toby.'"  Form  learned  from 
Sterne  is  the  quest ;  and  it  is  here  —  trick 
learned  from  Tristram,  but  also  art  learned 
from  the  Journey. 

For  trick,  Chapter  xxxm  consists  of  two 
sentences ;  Chapter  xiii,  of  one ;  Chapter 
xn,  of  asterisks.  The  opening  of  Chapter 
vi  is  like  Tristram,  and  it  is  like  Tris- 
tram to  have  this  chapter  sixth  instead  of 
first. 

1  Published  at  Turin,  1794. 

2  (Euvres  compUtes  du  Comte  Xavier  de  Maistre, 
etc.  (1  vol.),  precedee  d'une  notice  „  .  .  par  M. 
Sainte-Beuve  :  Paris,  Gamier,  1839  ;  page  xii. 


64 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 


CHAPITRE   VI. 

"  Ce  chapitre  n'est  absolument  que  pour  les 
metaphysiciens.  II  va  jeter  le  plus  grand  jour 
sur  la  nature  de  l'homme :  c'est  le  prisme  avec 
lequel  on  pourra  analyser  et  decomposer  les 
facultes  de  l'homme,  en  separant  la  puissance 
animale  des  rayons  purs  de  1'intelligence. 

"II  me  serait  impossible  d'expliquer  com- 
ment et  pourquoi  je  me  brulai  les  doigts  aux 
premiers  pas  que  je  fis  en  commen9ant  mon 
voyage,  sans  expliquer,  dans  le  plus  grand 
detail,  au  lecteur,  mon  systeme  de  Vdme  et  de  la 
hete.  —  Cette  decouverte  metaphysique  influe 
d'ailleurs  tellement  sur  mes  idees  et  sur  mes 
actions,  qu'il  serait  tres-difficile  de  comprendre 
ce  livre,  si  je  n'en  donnais  la  clef  au  com- 
mencement. 

"Je  me  suis  apercu,  par  diverses  observa- 
tions, que  Thomme  est  compose  d'une  ame  et 
d'une  bete. 

•  •  •  •  • 

"Je  tiens  d'un  vieux  professeur  (c'est  du 
plus  loin  qu'il  me  souvienne)  que  Platon  ap- 
pelait  la  matiere  V autre.     C'est  fort  bien  ;  mais 

5  65 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

j'aimerais  mieux  donner  ce  nom  par  excellence 
a  la  bete  qui  est  jointe  a  notre  ame.  C'est 
reellement  cette  substance  qui  est  V autre,  et 
qui  nous  lutine  d'une  maniere  si  etrange. 

"  Messieurs  et  mesdames,  soyez  fiers  de  votre 
intelligence  tant  qu'il  vous  plaira  ;  mais  defiez- 
vous  beau  coup  de  I  autre,  surtout  quand  vous 
£tes  ensemble." 


CHAPITRE    VII. 

"Cela  ne  vous  parait-il  pas  clair?  voici  un 
autre  example : 

"  Un  jour  de  l'ete  passe,  je  m'acheminai  pour 
aller  a  la  cour.  J'avais  peint  toute  la  matinee, 
et  mon  ame,  se  plaisant  a  m£diter  sur  la  pein- 
ture,  laissa  le  soin  a  la  bete  de  me  transporter 
au  palais  du  roi. 

"  Que  la  peinture  est  un  art  sublime  !  pen- 
sait  mon  ame  ; 

u  Pendant  que  mon  ame  faisait  ces  reflex- 
ions, I' autre  allait  son  train,  et  Dieu  sait  ou  elle 
allait !  —  Au  lieu  de  se  rendre  a  la  cour,  comme 

66 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

elle  en  avait  recu  l'ordre,  elle  deriva  tellement 
sur  la  gauche,  qu'au  moment  ou  mon  ame  la 
rattrapa,  elle  etait  a  la  porte  de  madame  de 
Hautcastel,  a  un  demi-mille  du  palais  royal. 

w  Je  laisse  a  penser  au  lecteur  ce  qui  serait 
arrive,  si  elle  etait  entree  toute  seule  chez  une 
aussi  belle  dame  " 


But  the  movement,  though  whimsical  and 
interrupted,  is  never  random  or  violent.  It 
is  like  that  of  the  Journey,  now  fast,  now 
slow,  flitting  apparently,  but  always  nicely 
calculated,  and  always  by  such  delicate  transi- 
tions as  are  almost  the  hall-mark  of  the 
Journey.  Hardly  one  of  these  miniature 
chapters,  miniature  like  Sterne's,  but  shows 
how  closely  Maistre  had  studied  Sterne's 
form,  how  sympathetically  he  realized  it,  how 
skilfully  he  followed.  Mark  that  artistically 
abrupt  introduction  of  Mme.  de  Hautcastel, 
just  quoted,  and  the  Steme  manner  even  to 
the  final  equivocation.  Of  all  this  a  typical 
instance  is  Chapter  xi :  — 


67 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN   FRANCE 


CHAPITRE   XI. 

"  II  ne  faut  pas  anticiper  sur  les  evenements  : 
l'empressement  de  communiquer  au  lecteur 
mon  systeme  de  Tame  et  de  la  bete  m'a  fait 
abandonner  le  description  de  mon  lit  plus  tot 
que  je  ne  devais  ;  lorsque  je  l'aurai  terminee, 
je  reprendrai  mon  voyage  a  l'endroit  ou  je  l'ai 
interrompu  dans  le  chapitre  precedent.  —  Je 
vous  prie  seulement  de  vous  ressouvenir  que 
nous  avons  laisse  la  moitie  de  moimeme  tenant 
le  portrait  de  madame  de  Hautcastel  tout  pres 
de  la  muraille,  a  quatre  pas  de  mon  bureau. 
J'avais  oublie,  en  parlant  de  mon  lit,  de  con- 
seiller  a  tout  homme  qui  le  pourra  d'avoir  un 
lit  de  couleur  rose  et  blanc  :  il  est  certain  que 
les  couleurs  influent  sur  nous  au  point  de  nous 
egayer  ou  de  nous  attrister  suivant  leurs  nu- 
ances.—  Le  rose  et  le  blanc  sont  deux  couleurs 
consacrees  au  plaisir  et  a  la  felicite.  —  La 
nature,  en  les  donnant  a  la  rose,  lui  a  donne 
la  couronne  de  l'empire  de  Flore  ;  et  lorsque 
le  ciel  veut  annoncer  une  belle  journee  au 
monde,  il  colore  les  nues  de  cette  teinte  char- 
mante  au  lever  du  soleil. 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

"  Un  jour  nous  montions  avec  peine  le  long 
d'un  sentier  rapide  :  l'aimable  Rosalie  etait  en 
avant ;  son  agilite  lui  donnait  des  ailes  :  nous 
ne  pouvions  la  suivre.  —  Tout  a  coup,  arrivee 
au  sommet  d'un  tertre,  elle  se  tourna  vers  nous 
pour  reprendre  haleine,  et  sourit  a  notre  len- 
teur.  —  Jamais  peut-etre  les  deux  couleurs  dont 
je  fais  l'eloge  n'avaient  ainsi  triomphe.  Ses 
joues  enflammees,  ses  levres  de  corail,  ses  dents 
brillantes,  son  cou  d'albatre,  sur  un  fond  de 
verdure,  frapperent  tous  les  regards.  II  fallut 
nous  arreter  pour  la  contempler  :  je  ne  dis  rien 
de  ses  yeux  bleus,  ni  du  regard  qu'elle  jeta  sur 
nous,  parce  que  je  sortirais  de  mon  sujet,  et  que 
d'ailleurs  je  n'y  pense  jamais  que  le  moins  qu'il 
m'est  possible.  II  me  suffit  d'avoir  donne  le 
plus  bel  exemple  imaginable  de  la  superiorite 
de  ces  deux  couleurs  sur  toute  les  autres, 
et  de  leur  influence  sur  le  bonheur  des 
hommes. 

"  Je  n'irai  pas  plus  avant  aujourd'hui.  Quel 
sujet  pourrais-je  traiter  qui  ne  fut  insipide  ? 
Quelle  idee  n'est  pas  effacee  par  cette  idee  ? 
— Je  ne  sais  meme  quand  je  pourrai  me  remet- 
tre  a  l'ouvrage.  — Si  je  le  continue,  et  que  le 
lecteur  desire  en  voir  la  fin,  qu'il  s'addresse  a 
l'ange  distributeur  des  pensees,  et  qu'il  le  prie 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

de  ne  plus  meler  l'image  de  ce  tertre  parmi  la 
foule  de  pensees  decousues  qu'il  me  jette  a 
tout  instant. 

"  Sans  cette  precaution,  e'en  est  fait  de  mon 
voyage." 

Clearest  mark  of  all  is  the  delicacy  in 
transition,  as  in  the  opening  of  Chapter  xv, 
gauged  at  once  to  bring  the  servant  on  the 
scene  swiftly  and  to  explain  the  previous 
allusion  to  the  wet  sponge,  that  not  a  word 
may  be  displaced  or  wasted. 

The  fulness  and  minuteness  of  gesture  is 
not  only  characteristic  in  itself ;  it  also  shows 
that  Maistre  grasped  as  characteristic  in  this 
form  that  it  should  be  applied  to  the  most 
insignificant  incidents  and  the  smallest  ob- 
jects  —  a  portrait,  a  house-dog,  a  bed,  a  coat, 
a  rose,  —  and  that  it  should  be  applied  sen- 
timentally. Maistre  may  have  his  passing 
sarcasm  on  sentimentality;  but  his  whole 
book  is  steeped  in  it.  In  form  and  in  tone 
his  Voyage  is  a  sentimental  journey.  In 
form  and  in  tone  there  is  the  same  subtle 
unity  —  not  a  unity  of  the  fable,  for  the 

70 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

Voyage  has  no  more  narrative  unity  than  the 
Journey,  but  a  descriptive  unity.  No  wonder 
it  closes  like  the  Journey,  but  how  much 
more  delicately  ! 

For  the  Voyage  autour  de  ma  chambre  is 
not  a  copy.  It  has  not  a  single  detail 
demonstrably  borrowed,  and  as  a  whole  it  is 
original.  That  is  what  makes  its  imitation 
at  once  so  interesting  to  study  and  so  profit- 
able. This  is  literary  influence,  that  an 
author,  in  adopting  a  form,  should  use  it  for 
himself.  Thus,  for  instance,  that  Maistre 
should  so  have  modified  the  form  as  to 
present  less  drama  and  more  essay  follows 
from  the  temper  of  Maistre.  From  the 
temper  of  Maistre  also  comes  the  occasional 
tone  of  oratory,  the  larger  use  of  natural 
scenery,  the  very  slight  use  of  manners,  the 
comparatively  indistinct  presentation  of  per- 
sons, the  serious  reflections  philosophical  and 
religious.  And  the  nobler  soul  had  also  the 
freer  fancy  ;  he  is  less  concrete  or,  to  put 
it  conversely,  more  abstract,  more  purely 
fanciful.      In  a  word,  he  is  always  himself. 

71 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

He  learned  from  Sterne  precisely  as  one 
painter  learns  from  another. 

One  book,  then,  attests  the  influence  on 
French  literature  of  Sterne's  best  art,  of  the 
form  of  the  Sentimental  Journey.  Of  Tris- 
tram there  is  more  imitation  and  far  more 
reminiscence.  Of  Sterne's  sentimentality 
apart  from  his  form  the  influence,  wide  or 
narrow,  is  indistinguishable.  Yet "  Sterne  is 
so  French.'"  After  all,  is  he  ?  He  has  the 
quickest  sensibility  to  French  habits  of  ex- 
pression, but  not  so  much  to  manner  in  word 
as  to  manners,  to  attitude.  These  idioms 
he  read  at  sight ;  but  it  is  doubtful  that  he 
knew  French  intimately  enough  to  appreciate 
French  style. 

So  there  is  slight  promise  for  inquiry 
whether  Sterne,  teaching  so  remarkably  little 
to  France,  may  on  the  other  hand  have 
learned  something  from  her.  One  looks 
again  in  his  Prevost,  the  very  man  of  men 
for  Sterne ;  but  ten  pages  of  Manon  bring 
him  to  a  stand ;  a  story  always  in  motion,  a 
story  of  passion,  above  all  a  style  that  is 

72 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

what  Sterne's  at  its  best  never  is  —  artless,  a 
lovely  simplicity.  Not  all  the  tears  o'er 
faithless  Manon  shed  persuade  me  that 
Sterne  had  anything  from  the  Chevalier  des 
Grieux.  The  reminiscence  of  Scarron,  if  it 
be  a  reminiscence,  is  not  of  Scarron's  form. 
Certain  turns  in  the  Don  Quichotte  moderne 
(Pharsamori),  attributed  to  Marivaux,  may 
have  suggested  the  satirical  possibilities  of 
interrupted  and  tangled  narrative  so  highly 
developed  in  Shandy.  Further  Marivaux 
could  teach  Sterne  nothing  as  to  form. 
For,  though  he  realizes  the  descriptive  value 
of  minute  physical  details,  he  has  not  the 
art  of  composing  them.  He  accumulates  in 
ten  pages  a  descriptive  effect  that  Sterne 
compresses  into  one.  Nor  is  it  probable 
that  Sterne  had  anything  from  Crebillon 
fils.  He  visited  that  worthy ;  he  alludes 
in  the  Journey  to  his  Egarements  du  cceur  et 
Tesprit ;  he  concocted  with  him  the  precious 
plan  by  which  each  was  to  attack  the  mor- 
ality of  the  other's  books ;  but  nothing 
beyond   these   personal  relations    has   been 

73 


INFLUENCE  OF  STERNE  IN  FRANCE 

suggested   by  the   hardy  explorers   of  Cre- 
billon  fils. 

Sterne's  best  art,  then,  seems  underived 
and  almost  uncommunicated.  There  is  some 
color  for  calling  Tristram  Shandy  Rabelai- 
sian; but  the  Sentimental  Journey*  as  it  is 
one  of  the  most  exquisite  pieces  in  literature, 
is  also  one  of  the  most  unique. 


74 


The  Secret  of  John  Bunyan 


Each   recognition  of  The  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress    as    a   classic   stirs,  no   scruple   indeed, 
but  a  latent  wonder.     For  a  classic  the  book 
has  singular  qualities ;  it  is  religious  and  it 
is  popular  —  not  incidentally  religious,  not 
potentially  popular,  but  essentially  religious 
and  immediately  popular.     Is  it  a  classic  be- 
cause  of  these  traits  or  in  spite  of  them  ? 
Very  little  of  the  great  literature  in   any 
language  is  religious ;  very  little,  like  Rob- 
inson   Crusoe    and    some   of    Shakespeare's 
comedies,   is    popular  in  the   full   sense   of 
being  immediately  loved  and  constantly  read 
by  the  great  public.     And  we  must  search 
far  to  find  another  classic  that  is  both  the 
one  and   the  other.     The  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress stands  almost  alone. 

True,  there  is  hardly  a  great  classic  but 
touches  on  things  divine.    Divine  things  have 


75 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

a  large  place  in  the  JEneid ;  they  are  the 
substance  of  the  Divina  Commedia  and 
Paradise  Lost.  But  these  great  poems 
are  not  so  much  religious  as  theological. 
They  speculate  on  the  order  of  the  universe  ; 
they  symbolize  abstract  truths;  they  even 
embody  dogmas.  The  Pilgrim's  Prog?rss 
differs  from  them  sharply  in  being  a  practi- 
cal guide  for  daily  conduct,  a  parable  of  the 
common  journey  of  common  men.  Thus  it 
is  in  the  literal  sense  religious  ;  and  it  is 
almost  our  only  religious  classic. 

Its  popularity,  again,  is  larger  than  the 
popularity  of  most  classics.  It  has  been 
read  for  two  hundred  years,  not  only  by  all 
English-speaking  people  who  have  a  taste 
for  literature,  but  also  by  thousands  who 
have  no  taste  for  literature  and  who  may 
never  have  thought  of  it  as  literary.  It  was 
the  appeal  of  a  common  man  to  common 
men  ;  and  it  has  been  really  read  and  re- 
read, not  simply  heard  of  and  admired,  by 
plain  people  everywhere.  To  popularity  of 
this  kind  there  are  few  parallels.     One  thinks 

76 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

of  Robinson  Crusoe,  and  then  halts  for 
another  instance.  Popularity  in  some  de- 
gree, of  course,  every  classic  must  have,  in 
order  to  become  a  classic,  in  order  to  survive. 
But  it  was  a  small  literary  circle  that  fostered 
the  fame  of  the  Mneid  in  its  own  time,  and 
a  comparatively  small  class  that  kept  it  alive 
in  a  strange  fashion  through  the  middle  ages. 
We  can  hardly  compare  ancient  popularity 
with  modern,  because  ancient  writers  could 
hardly  reach  what  we  now  call  the  public,  for 
lack  of  the  printing  press.  But  Milton  had 
the  press ;  and  though  he  could  thus,  in  some- 
thing of  our  modern  sense,  appeal  to  the 
public,  yet  his  very  appeal  for  the  liberty  of 
that  press  reached  the  few,  not  the  many. 
Paradise  Lost,  like  the  Mneid,  must  always 
be  the  joy  and  admiration  of  the  in- 
tellectually superior.  It  is  over  the  heads  of 
the  crowd.  Now  the  crowd  is  the  proper 
audience  of  Bunyan.  The  Pilgrim* s  Prog- 
ress is  popular  in  the  sense  that  it  is  one  of 
the  very  few  literary  classics  written  of  the 
people,  for  the  people,  almost  by  the  people. 

77 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

In  this  twofold  character,  religious  and  pop- 
ular, The  Pilgrim's  Progress  will  always 
remind  us  of  its  country  and  its  age.  It 
is  a  product  of  English  Puritanism.  For 
the  Puritan  movement  may  be  summed  up 
as  at  once  religious  and  popular,  both  blended 
in  one.  It  was  a  great  effort  for  popular  gov- 
ernment in  Church  and  State.  It  set  itself 
against  hierarchy  and  monarchy  alike;  it 
overthrew  both  the  king  and  the  bishops. 
The  immediate  practical  result  in  politics  was 
the  Commonwealth,  and,  in  religion,  the 
spread  of  the  congregational  organization 
and  mode  of  worship.  These  results,  and 
the  many  others  that  followed  from  them, 
proceeded  from  a  single,  dominant  Puritan 
principle  —  the  independence  of  the  indi- 
vidual man  in  the  kingdom  of  earth  and 
the  kingdom  of  heaven. 

Written  at  the  flood  tide  of  popular 
government,  and  of  protest,  dissent,  and  in- 
dividual assertion  in  religion,  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress  has  a  tang  of  Puritanism.  "  Con- 
viction  for    sin,"    "  awakenings    for   sin," 

78 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

"professors"  of  religion,  —  these  words  of 
"the  language  of  Canaan"  were  common 
religious  speech  in  the  thatched  midland 
cottages  at  whose  doors  Bunyan  mended 
pots  and  pans,  and  in  the  rough-hewn  New 
England  houses  where  his  great  book  found 
quick  sympathy.  He  speaks  for  the  soldiers 
of  Cromwell  and  of  Miles  Standish,  much 
more  for  that  unknown  multitude  who, 
though  no  warriors,  felt  the  call  to  work 
out  their  own  salvation  with  fear  and  trem- 
bling. He  speaks  for  the  people  that  could 
say  unabashed,  man  to  man,  "How  stands 
it  between  God  and  your  soul  now  ?  " 

The  position  of  such  men  among  their 
"worldly"  fellows,  the  feelings  of  each  party 
toward  the  other,  have  never  been  more 
surely  divined,  never  more  vividly  expressed, 
than  by  Bunyan.  "There  is  a  company  of 
these  crazed-headed  coxcombs,"  says  Mr. 
Obstinate,  "that  when  they  take  a  fancy  by 
the  end  are  wiser  in  their  own  eyes  than  seven 
men  that  can  render  a  reason."  "Too  pre- 
cise," "some  peevish  or  melancholy  man,"  — 

79 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 


phrases  like  these  continually  echo  what  is 
exhibited  fully  in  Faithful's  account  of 
Shame  and  in  the  whole  chapter  on  Vanity 
Fair.  Sometimes,  indeed,  Bunyan  seems 
Puritan  in  that  less  pleasing  sense  which 
brought  the  name  into  reproach.  As  many 
men  of  Bunyan's  day  resented  in  the  Puritans 
that  self-satisfaction  and  censoriousness 
which  are  pilloried  in  Malvolio,  so  some 
readers  have  resented  the  dialogues  with 
Talkative  and  Ignorance.  Something  un- 
kind, something  Pharisaical,  is  easily  seen 
by  the  world  in  those  who  feel  bound  to  pro- 
test against  the  world.  But  whether  this 
attitude  was  essential  in  Puritanism  or  not, 
certainly  it  was  not  essential  in  John  Bunyan. 
Arrogance  was  not  one  of  his  sins.  Uncom- 
promising as  the  stiffest  of  them  all  on  every 
point  of  principle,  he  yet  shows  in  the  ground 
of  all  his  work  a  large  and  positive  charity. 
His  creed  was  no  stronger  than  his  love. 

For  to  say  that  in  its  religious  and  its  popu- 
lar character  Pilgrim's  Progress  bespeaks 
its  time  is  not  to  limit   it  by  its   time.     It 


80 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

bears  the  character  of  Puritanism  only  in 
its  less  significant  traits.  If  the  words  that 
went  from  Bedford  jail  to  all  Christendom 
occasionally  bespeak  the  Puritan,  they 
always  bespeak  something  too  large  to  be 
measured  by  Bunyan's  environment.  Still 
less  can  they  be  measured  by  the  outward 
events  of  his  own  life.  As  with  most  really 
great  authors,  we  rather  understand  the  man 
from  the  book  than  the  book  from  the  man. 
But  for  the  inner  life  Bunyan's  case  shows 
a  striking  exception.  That  life  of  the  mind 
which  is  the  only  significant  life  of  a  great 
author,  is  not  merely  expressed  as  authors 
commonly  express  themselves  in  their  works ; 
it  is  also  recorded.  Grace  Abounding  is 
the  autobiography  of  his  soul.  This  is  in 
truth  the  life  of  John  Bunyan,  and  the  only 
life  that  tells  us  why  he  could  write  for  all 
mankind.  For  this  book  reveals  his  amazing 
faculty  of  vision,  his  power,  that  is,  to  see  the 
invisible  things  of  the  spirit.  Seeing  them 
as  it  were  before  his  eyes,  he  felt  them  as 
most  men  feel  the  love  or  the  loss  of  a  friend : 


81 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

he  struggled  to  win  them  as  most  men  struggle 
for  money  or  fame.  This  makes  the  Puritan 
tinker,  "of  a  low  and  inconsiderable  genera- 
tion,'' great  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven.  The 
Pilgrim' 's  Progress  is  at  once  popular  and  re- 
ligious because  its  author  was  at  once  utterly 
a  man  of  the  people  and  utterly  a  man  of 
God.  All  things  were  lacking  in  his  life 
which  might  have  hindered  direct  and  con- 
stant touch  with  ordinary  men  and  women, 
with  the  real  people  of  this  world ;  and  he 
had  courage  of  faith  to  put  all  things  from 
him  which  might  have  hindered  his  constant 
touch  with  the  other  world.  His  expression 
of  the  spiritual  world  is  most  simple  and 
homely  because  he  himself  was  simpler  and 
homelier  than  any  other  Englishman  who 
ever  took  a  pen;  but  it  is  most  intense  be- 
cause he  himself  was  a  fellow-citizen  with 
the  saints. 

These  two  essential  traits  of  the  man, 
the  religious  and  the  popular,  made  him  a 
preacher ;  and  his  preaching  in  turn  reacted 
upon  them,  developing  and  enhancing  them 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

to  the  highest.  If  we  think  of  Bunyan  as  he 
thought  of  himself,  we  must  think  of  him  as 
a  preacher  of  the  spiritual  life  to  common 
men.  True,  his  great  and  abiding  works  are 
not  sermons;  but  the  sermon  instinct  and 
training  are  behind  all;  and,  in  a  larger 
sense,  there  is  in  all  his  work  a  certain  oral 
character,  as  if  the  printed  words  had  first 
been  spoken.  Speech  sounded  in  his  ears, 
struggled  to  his  lips,  and  was  directed  to  the 
ears  rather  than  the  eyes  of  others. 

Indeed,  Bunyan's  preaching  habit  occa- 
sionally delays  the  story  of  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress  by  rather  tedious  sermon-heads,  as 
in  the  reply  to  Ignorance ;  but  such  passages 
are  not  characteristic.  These  occasional  dis- 
putations are  of  the  age  rather  than  of  the 
man.  They  are  not  his  own  way.  He  was 
not  a  reasoner.  He  did  not  know  how  to 
convince  men  by  a  logical  series  of  para- 
graphs. The  headings  and  sub-headings  of 
his  sermons  may  be  merely  false  framework, 
set  up  because  everybody  about  him  thought 
that    the   way   to    make   a   sermon.      The 

83 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN   BUNYAN 

strength  of  his  preaching  was  not  there,  but 
in  his  faculty  of  vision  and  his  faculty  of 
speech.  He  pictured  vividly  in  his  own  mind 
both  things  and  thoughts;  he  had  a  seeing 
imagination.  And  to  an  equally  extraordi- 
nary degree  he  had  the  gift  to  utter  what  he 
saw  and  felt  in  words  that  would  make  his 
hearers  see  and  feel  too.  His  gift  of  speech 
was  so  great  that  he  had  to  speak.  He  had 
to  express  himself.  No  bar  could  stop  him ; 
not  ignorance,  for  he  contrived  to  learn 
enough  from  the  poorest  hints ;  not  repres- 
sion, for  prison  merely  forced  him  to  write 
what  he  would  have  spoken.  He  might  well 
cry  in  the  apostolic  words,  "Woe  is  me  if  I 
preach  not."  The  faculty  of  vision,  the 
faculty  of  spiritual  emotion,  above  all,  the 
faculty  of  imparting  both  visions  and  emo- 
tions in  speech,  these  powers  appear  plainly, 
throughout  Bunyan's  work,  in  three  corre- 
sponding qualities.  First,  all  his  characteris- 
tic work  is  very  concrete.  It  is  what  we  now 
call  picturesque.  It  is  full  of  images.  Even 
when  he  explains,  he  habitually  falls    into 

84 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

description.  As  his  mind  habitually  turned 
abstract  ideas  into  images,  so  his  speech  is 
habitually  in  terms  of  things  actually  seen. 
All  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  is  a  vision ;  and 
this  his  greatest  work  is  merely  the  best  em- 
bodiment of  his  constant  habit.  Secondly, 
his  appeal  is  not  to  the  intellect,  but  to  the 
feelings.  Finally,  all  his  work  is  essentially 
oral.  Most  of  it  that  was  written  was  first 
spoken.  Much  of  it  was  never  written. 
And  even  when  he  wrote  to  be  read,  instead 
of  speaking  to  be  heard,  his  forms  of  ex- 
pression are  more  oral  than  those  of  any 
other  English  writer  except  the  orators. 
Bunyan  should  be  read  aloud.  It  seems  as 
if  he  wrote  aloud. 

The  first  of  his  cardinal  qualities,  that  habit 
of  concrete  and  specific  words,  came  from  his 
faculty  of  vision.  "Remember  your  tears 
and  prayers  to  God,  yea,  how  you  sighed 
under  every  hedge  for  mercy.  .  .  .  Have  you 
forgot  the  close,  the  milk-house,  the  stable,  the 
barn  .  .  .  where  God  did  visit  your  soul?" 
The   dullest  reader  must  feel,   because   he 

85 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

must  see.  Bunyan  makes  mental  states  real 
by  making  them  almost  visible  and  tangible. 
With  him  a  figure  of  speech  is  not  merely  a 
form  of  expression ;  it  is  the  form  of  expres- 
sion. He  sees  it  in  his  mind ;  it  takes  shape ; 
and  as  he  sees  it,  so  he  utters  it.  "By  these 
things  my  mind  was  now  so  turned  that  it  lay 
like  a  horse-leech  at  the  vein,  still  crying  out, 
'Give,  give.'"  Or  again,  "I  often,  when 
these  temptations  had  been  with  force  upon 
me,  did  compare  myself  to  the  case  of  such 
a  child  whom  some  gypsy  hath  by  force  took 
up  in  her  arms,  and  is  carrying  from  friend 
and  country.  Kick  sometimes  I  did,  and 
also  shriek  and  cry;  but  yet  I  was  bound  in 
the  wings  of  the  temptation,  and  the  wind 
would  carry  me  away." 

These  concrete,  specific,  figurative  forms 
of  expression  are  not  added  to  illustrate  or 
adorn.  They  express  the  thought  faithfully 
as  he  thought  it.  For  him  to  think  was  to  see. 
His  power  of  vision  is  not  the  mastery  of  a 
literary  device;  it  is  the  development  of  the 
habit  of  his  brain.    No  one  should  doubt  that 


86 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

the  images  in  which  he  presents  the  spiritual 
experiences  of  Grace  Abounding,  far  from 
being  chosen  to  illustrate  that  experience,  are 
the  very  facts  of  the  experience  itself.  "I 
could  also,"  he  says  earnestly  at  the  end  of 
his  introduction,  "have  stepped  into  a  style 
much  higher  than  this  .  .  .  and  could  have 
adorned  all  things  more  than  here  I  have 
seemed  to  do ;  but  I  dare  not.  God  did  not 
play  in  tempting  of  me;  neither  did  I  play 
when  I  sunk  as  into  the  bottomless  pit,  when 
the  pangs  of  hell  caught  hold  upon  me. 
Wherefore  I  may  not  play  in  relating  of  them, 
but  be  plain  and  simple,  and  lay  down  the 
thing  as  it  was." 

Therefore  we  may  confidently  accept  as 
faithful,  literal  record  the  many  passages  such 
as  the  following,  and  see  in  them  what  a  brain 
was  his  instrument.  "At  last,  when  I  was 
as  it  were  quite  worn  out  with  fear  lest  it 
should  not  lay  hold  on  me,  these  words  did 
sound  suddenly  within  my  heart:  'He  is 
able.'  But  methought  this  word  able  was 
spoke  loud  unto  me.    It  showed  a  great  word ; 

87 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

it  seemed  to  be  writ  in  great  letters."  Re- 
markable as  this  seeing  imagination  is  in 
itself,  it  is  no  more  remarkable  than  its  close 
associations  with  his  gift  of  speech.  As  he 
thinks,  he  sees;  and  as  he  sees,  he  hears 
words  or  wishes  to  utter  them.  There  is  the 
physical  basis  of  Bunyan's  genius,  the  brain 
that  could  speak  so  that  all  men  might 
see.1 

Grace  Abounding,  indeed,  is  in  every 
way  the  best  commentary  on  Bunyan.  It 
even  records,  among  his  earlier  experiences, 
one  that  not  only  typifies  the  mental  habits 
which  underlay  his  peculiar  literary  power, 

1  Professor  Royce,  in  an  investigation  of  the  widest 
interest,  has  translated  Grace  Abounding  into  the  terms 
of  modern  psychology.  The  record  should  be  read 
entire ;  but  a  brief  quotation  will  suggest  its  drift. 
"  Automatic  internal  vision  .  .  .  with  extraordinary 
detail  and  with  strong  emotional  accompaniment  .  .  . 
a  frequent  incident  in  Bunyan's  inner  life  .  .  .  be- 
came the  main  source  of  his  peculiar  artistic  power. " 
And,  again,  rejecting  the  theory  of  hallucination,  he 
interprets  Bunyan's  torments  as  systematized,  insist- 
ent motor  speech-functions.  ( Josiah  Royce  :  The  Case 
of  John  Bunyan,  Psychological  Review,  vol.  i.  (1894), 
pages  22,  134,  230.) 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

but  also  seems  like  the  nucleus  of  The  Pil- 
grim's Progress. 

"  About  this  time  the  state  and  happiness  of 
these  poor  people  at  Bedford  was  thus,  in  a  kind 
of  vision,  presented  to  me.  I  saw  as  if  they  were 
on  the  sunny  side  of  some  high  mountain,  there 
refreshing  themselves  with  the  pleasant  beams  of 
the  sun,  while  I  was  shivering  and  shrinking  in 
the  cold,  afflicted  with  frost,  snow,  and  dark 
clouds.  Methought  also,  betwixt  me  and  them, 
I  saw  a  wall  that  did  compass  about  this  moun- 
tain. Now  through  this  wall  my  soul  did  greatly 
desire  to  pass,  concluding  that  if  I  could,  I  would 
even  go  into  the  very  midst  of  them,  and  there  also 
comfort  myself  with  the  heat  of  their  sun. 

"  About  this  wall  I  bethought  myself  to  go 
again  and  again,  still  prying  as  I  went,  to  see  if 
I  could  find  some  way  or  passage  by  which  I 
might  enter  therein;  but  none  could  I  find  for 
some  time.  At  the  last  I  saw,  as  it  were,  a  nar- 
row gap,  like  a  little  door-way  in  the  wall,  through 
which  I  attempted  to  pass.  Now  the  passage 
being  very  strait  and  narrow,  I  made  many 
efforts  to  get  in,  but  all  in  vain,  even  until  I  was 
well  nigh  quite  beat  out  by  striving  to  get  in.  At 
last,  with  great  striving,  methought  I  at  first  did 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 


get  in  my  head,  and  after  that,  by  a  sidling  striv- 
ing, my  shoulders  and  my  whole  body.  Then  I 
was  exceeding  glad,  went  and  sat  down  in  the 
midst  of  them,  and  so  was  comforted  with  the 
light  and  heat  of  their  sun." 

When  we  thus  comprehend  that  Bunyan's 
allegory  was  not  a  literary  method  deliber- 
ately adopted  for  literary  effect,  but  the  ex- 
pression by  a  born  speaker  of  the  images  in 
which  he  habitually  thought,  we  understand 
better  why  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  has 
been,  and  is  still,  and  perhaps  always  will  be, 
more  popular  than  any  other  allegory  ever 
written.  Allegory  has  sometimes  been  more 
popular  as  a  literary  form  than  it  is  now; 
but  typically  it  precludes  popular  appeal  by 
seeming  artificial.  All  the  beauty  of  The 
Faery  Queene  could  not  make  it  popular; 
for  since  the  Red  Cross  Knights  of  allegory 
are  figures  delicately  contrived,  not  persons 
seen,  their  combats  are  shadows.  But  Bun- 
yan's  images,  whether  of  persons  or  of  actions 
or  of  feelings,  are  the  main  facts  of  his  life. 
They  were  as  actual  to  him  as  the  tools  of  his 

90 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

tinkering  trade.  He  was  a  common  man, 
speaking  the  common  speech;  Spenser  was 
an  aristocrat,  speaking  the  language  of  the 
court.  There  is  the  other  important  reason 
for  the  difference.  The  main  reason,  how- 
ever, is  that  Bunyan's  realization  of  things 
unseen  is  not  made  by  literary  contrivance, 
but  born  of  reality. 

For  to  his  extraordinary  realization  of  his 
own  mental  images  was  added  an  intimate 
knowledge  of  other  men.  Though  his  inner 
life,  as  has  been  said,  determined  his  habits 
and  character  to  a  very  unusual  degree, 
though  it  was  by  far  the  greater  part  of  him, 
yet  it  was  not  all.  He  was  not  a  recluse.  He 
was  a  common  workman,  with  a  family  to 
support  by  a  trade  that  took  him  to  the  doors 
of  all  sorts  of  common  men.  He  was  a 
preacher,  not  writing  for  unknown  readers, 
but  speaking  to  the  feelings  and  wills  of  par- 
ticular people.  It  was  by  the  practical  effort 
to  bring  peace  to  other  men's  souls  that  he 
confirmed  peace  in  his  own.  He  knew  the 
people  to  whom  he  preached.     He  counselled 

91 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

them  as  their  brother  and  pastor.  He  talked 
more  than  he  preached.  He  preached  and 
talked  more  than  he  wrote.  He  dealt  every 
day  with  sin  and  repentance,  hope,  despair, 
selfishness,  fickleness,  faith,  —  not  as  they 
are  presented  in  books,  not  merely  as  he  saw 
them  in  himself,  but  as  he  actually  found 
them  in  this  man  and  that  woman.  So  the 
men  and  women  in  The  Pilgrim 's  Progress, 
though  they  are  made  by  an  extraordinary 
imagination,  are  made  out  of  close  observa- 
tion. He  made  them,  not  out  of  himself,  but 
out  of  the  real  men  and  women  of  Bedford- 
shire. Few  novels  have  more  convincing 
pieces  of  characterization  than  the  episode 
of  Mr.  By-Ends  or  the  trial  of  Faithful. 

That  Bunyan  was  no  novelist  any  one  may 
satisfy  himself  by  reading  Mr.  Badman. 
Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  its  tediousness  as  a 
story,  Mr.  Badman  gives  abundant  proof  of 
the  breadth,  accuracy,  and  intimacy  of  Bun- 
yan's  acquaintance  with  the  twistings  of 
human  character.  Indeed,  the  book  fails, 
not  merely  from  being  too  sermonizing,  but 

92 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 


from  being  too  documentary.     It  is  a  series 
of  bare  human  facts  without  the  vivifying 
of  his  imagination;    but  it  is  documentary 
proof,  if  any  were  needed,  of  his  wide  knowl- 
edge of  human  nature  outside  of  himself. 
"Yet  have  I  as  little  as  may  be,"  he  says  in 
the  preface,  "gone  out  of  the  road  of  mine 
own  observation  of  things.     Yea,  I  think  I 
may  truly  say,  to  the  best  of  my  remembrance, 
all  the  things  that  I  here  discourse  of,  I  mean 
as  to  matters  of  fact,  have  been  acted  upon 
the  stage  of  this  world  even  many  times  before 
mine   eyes."     The   difference   between   The 
Pilgrim's  Progress  and  Mr.  Badman  is  in 
artistic  imagination.    The  former  is  idealized 
and  so  made  universally  appealing ;  the  latter 
is  merely  stated  and  explained,  as  on  the  wit- 
ness stand.     But  both  reveal  the  eye  that  saw 
into  other  men  as  well  as  into  himself. 

Bunyan's  power  over  the  emotions  follows 
naturally  from  his  power  of  vision.  But  in 
another  way  also  it  was  a  necessity  of  his 
nature,  in  that  he  could  not  appeal  much  to 
reason.     His  thoughts  did  not  move  logically ; 


93 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

and  he  had  no  logical  training.  Ideas  with 
him  were  hardly  seen  and  followed,  but  rather 
felt  and  passionately  held.  It  was  no  course 
of  doctrine  or  chain  of  reasons  that  he  got 
from  the  Bible,  but  only  a  throng  of  texts  that 
seemed  to  struggle  within  him.  "A  piece  of 
a  sentence,"  he  writes  in  Grace  Abound- 
ing "darted  in  upon  me;"  and,  a  few  pages 
later : 

"'Lord,'  thought  I,  'if  both  these  scriptures 
should  meet  in  my  heart  at  once,  I  wonder  which 
would  get  the  better  of  me.'  So  methought  I  had 
a  longing  mind  that  they  might  come  both  to- 
gether upon  me.  Yea,  I  desired  of  God  they 
might.  Well,  about  two  or  three  days  after,  so 
they  did  indeed.  They  bolted  both  upon  me  at 
a  time,  and  did  work  and  struggle  strongly  in  me 
for  a  while.  At  last  that,  about  Esau's  birthright, 
began  to  wax  weak,  and  withdraw,  and  vanish; 
and  this,  about  the  sufficiency  of  grace,  prevailed 
with  peace  and  joy." 

This  is  hardly  an  intellectual  process;  it 
is  almost  pure  feeling. 

94 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

So  the  common  belief  that  a  writer's  power 
to  make  others  feel  vibrates  from  the  intensity 
of  his  own  experience  is  in  Bunyan 's  case  veri- 
fied to  the  utmost.  From  his  inward  agonies 
and  triumph,  from  going  down  himself,  as 
he  says,  into  the  deep,  he  learned  how  to  stir 
men's  souls.  The  dark  first  part  of  Grace 
Abounding  explains  that  moving  power  of 
which  he  writes  so  explicitly,  though  so 
modestly,  in  the  last  part.  His  power  to  stir 
spiritual  emotions  came  from  his  own  en- 
larged spiritual  capacity. 

"To  me  the  writings  of  John  Bunyan  have 
been  and  are  more  and  more  as  the  odour  of 
a  field  which  the  Lord  hath  blessed,  redolent 
of  that  goodness  and  sweetness,  that  un- 
worldliness  and  love  of  Christ,  that  humility 
and  horror  of  sin,  which  I  take  to  mark  the 
presence  of  the  spirit  of  God,  even  in  the 
midst  of  much  human  infirmity  and  delusion. 
It  is  not  easy  for  an  Englishman,  Catholic 
or  Protestant,  who  understands  Bunyan,  to 
read  him  with  dry  eyes  and  without  feel- 
ing   his    heart   softened   to  impressions   of 

95 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

grace/'1  That  was  written  by  a  Catholic; 
and  Bunyan's  kinship  of  spirit  with  many 
whose  spiritual  environment  was  utterly 
different  is  suggested  by  a  passage  in  Grace 
Abounding  which  reminds  one  of  St.  Francis 
and  St.  Cuthbert:  "I  thought  I  could 
have  spoken  of  his  love  and  have  told  of 
his  mercy  to  me  even  to  the  very  crows 
that  sat  upon  the  ploughed  lands  before 
me." 

Further  interpretation  of  Bunyan's  style 
seems  to  have  been  baffled  by  that  rare  sin- 
cerity which  makes  his  utterance  an  almost 
perfect  medium.  His  style  is  obviously  col- 
loquial. That  in  itself  explains  little  —  nay 
rather  seems  itself  to  demand  explanation; 
for  Bunyan  is  not  quite  colloquial  in  the  or- 
dinary sense.  He  is  not  colloquial  as  a  man 
of  letters  permits  himself  to  be  colloquial. 
He  is  colloquial  because  he  is  oral.  This  oral 
quality  of  his  style,  closely  related  to  its  con- 

1  Joseph  Rickaby,  "  St.  Ignatius  and  John  Bun- 
yan," American  Catholic  Quarterly  Review,  volume  27, 
page  295. 

96 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

creteness  and  its  emotional  character,  sum- 
ming up  at  once  its  religious  and  its  popular 
significance,  may  even  be  called  his  distinc- 
tive note.  For  it  runs  through  all  his  ex- 
pression. That  his  life  was  preaching,  that 
much  of  his  written  work  was  first  spoken, 
has  already  been  said,  and  also  that  his 
strongest  native  impulse  was  speech.  It 
may  well  be  remembered  also  that  even 
when  his  works  seem  furthest  from  preach- 
ing he  often  writes  in  a  kind  of  dramatic 
dialogue.  But,  more  widely,  his  character- 
istic work  sounds  less  like  writing  than  like 
talk.  It  is  homely  and  familiar  —  and  no 
other  author  seems  quite  so  homely,  quite 
so  familiar  —  because  it  is  colloquial  in  the 
literal  sense.  With  fearless  simplicity  his 
diction  follows  the  ways  of  common  speech. 
It  is  not  literary  in  the  ordinary  sense;  it  is 
even  illiterate,  for  his  many  revisions  of  The 
Pilgrim's  Progress  left  it  in  many  places 
incorrect ;  it  is  simply  what  a  genius  made 
of  the  actual  every-day  talk  of  the  street. 
His  racy  popular  proverbs  are  worth  col- 

7  97 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

lecting  as  picturesque  summaries  of  the 
worldly  wisdom  of  our  ancestors.  Some  of 
them  are  still  current  to-day. 

A  bird  in  the  hand  is  worth  two  in  the  bush. 

Every  fat  must  stand  upon  his  own  bottom. 

A  saint  abroad  and  a  devil  at  home. 

A  waterman,  looking  one  way  and  rowing  another. 

The  Pilgrim's  Progress  has  many  an- 
other; and  as  many  more  may  be  found  in 
Mr,  Badman. 

It  is  ill  puddling  in  a  cockatrice's  den. 

They  run  hazards  that  hunt  the  wild  boar. 

All  was  fish  that  came  to  his  net. 

Hedges  have  eyes,  and  little  pitchers  have  ears. 

The  bird  in  the  air  knows  not  the  notes  of  the  bird 

in  the  snare. 
Penny  wise  and  pound  foolish. 
Like  to  like,  quoth  the  devil  to  the  collier. 

Quite  like  them  is  Bunyan's  own  homeli- 
ness. "As  for  those  that  made  boggle  and 
stop  at  things,"  he  says  in  Mr.  Badman,  "  and 
that  could  not  in  conscience,  and  for  fear  of 
death  and  judgment,  do  such  things  as  he, 
he  would  call  them  fools  and  noddies,  and 
charge  them  with  being  frighted  with  the  talk 

98 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

of  unseen  bugbears."  And  again,  "Fluster 
and  huff  and  make  ado  for  a  while  he  may; 
but  God  hath  determined  that  both  he  and 
it  shall  melt  like  grease."  One  of  the 
prettiest  instances  is  a  figure.  "Some  cry 
out  against  sin  even  as  the  mother  cries  out 
against  the  child  in  her  lap,  when  she  calleth 
it  slut  and  naughty  girl,  and  then  falls  to 
hugging  and  kissing  it."  Readers  who  are 
startled  at  "gallons  of  blood,"  or  disgusted 
at  his  enlarging  upon  the  scriptural  figure  of 
vomit,  may  find  in  Bunyan's  style  some  of 
the  faults,  as  well  as  all  the  virtue,  of  com- 
mon speech.  But  alike  in  its  great  force 
and  its  little  nicety,  it  is  thoroughly  com- 
munal. It  is  the  nearest  approach  in 
our  literature  to  the  very  voice  of  the 
people. 

Thus  to  be  as  it  were  the  inspired  mouth- 
piece for  common  English  speech  was  per- 
haps less  Bunyan's  choice  than  his  necessity. 
He  hardly  knew  any  other  diction.  He  made 
literature  unconsciously;  for  he  was  any- 
thing but  a  man  of  letters.     Without  laying 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

undue  stress  on  the  fact  that  at  thirty  he  was 
still  an  illiterate  tinker,  it  is  but  emphasizing 
the  essential  character  of  his  education  to  say- 
that  he  was  almost  independent  of  books. 
When  we  remember  how  far  even  the  most 
original  authors  have  formed  their  styles  upon 
their  reading,  we  must  see  in  Bunyan  a  start- 
ling exception.  His  mind  had  so  extraor- 
dinarily few  literary  associations  to  work 
upon  that  it  moved  naturally  by  the  oral 
associations  of  common  speech.  That  fact, 
for  it  is  a  fact,  explains  almost  by  itself 
why  his  style,  more  constantly  than  any 
other  great  author's  is  thoroughly  popular. 
Undoubtedly  he  meant  it  to  be  so;  but 
undoubtedly  he  could  not,  without  violat- 
ing all  truth  of  expression,  have  made  it 
otherwise. 

Of  course  Bunyan  did  know  one  book  ex- 
ceptionally well.  He  knew  the  English  Bible. 
He  thumbed  it  from  cover  to  cover.  He  read 
it  daily.  He  almost  lived  on  it.  He  knew 
much  of  it  by  heart;  for  he  quotes  widely 
from   memory.     The   English   Bible,   then, 

100 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 


must  have  influenced  his  style.  So  to  some 
degree  it  did.  But  the  inference,  made  by 
most  critics,  that  he  formed  his  style  on  the 
Bible,  is  quite  too  large.  The  point  is  worth 
investigation,  for  the  better  understanding 
of  a  great  and  singular  genius.  To  begin 
with,  we  should  not  forget  that  many  pas- 
sages in  Bunyan  which  at  first  suggest  our 
Bible  do  so  simply  because  they  belong  to  the 
same  century.  We  hastily  call  them  Biblical 
because  they  seem  somewhat  archaic.  Now 
the  English  Bible  was  occasionally  archaic 
even  for  its  own  time,  because  the  translators 
deliberately  retained  some  passages  from 
older  versions.  Moreover,  their  translation 
was  made  seventeen  years  before  Bunyan  was 
born;  and  the  language  was  changing  more 
rapidly  then  than  it  changes  now.  But, 
making  due  allowances  for  these  facts,  we 
may  still  convince  ourselves  by  comparison 
that  many  of  the  so-called  Biblical  phrases  in 
Bunyan  are  common  seventeenth-century 
English. 

Further,  we  must  determine  whether  the 


101 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

style  of  the  Bible  much  influenced  the  style 
of  Bunyan  by  studying  just  how.  How  does 
Bunyan  use  the  Bible  ?  In  a  word,  he  uses 
it,  not  as  a  literary  model,  but  as  any  preacher 
uses  it  to-day,  —  by  quotation.  All  his  work 
is  full  of  quotations,  not  only  texts  quoted  en- 
tire, but  phrases  inserted  verbatim  or  adapted 
to  the  construction  of  his  own  sentences. 
They  are,  as  it  were,  sewed  on  rather  than 
woven  in.  They  are  readily  distinguishable 
from  his  own  texture.  For  his  own  style  re- 
mains distinct  and  different.  Almost  any 
page  of  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  will  show 
this  twofold  character.  As  in  a  mixture  of 
oil  and  vinegar,  the  two  elements  mingle  with- 
out uniting.  When  Bunyan  is  quoting,  he 
is  not  like  the  Bible ;  he  is  the  Bible.  When 
he  is  not  quoting,  he  is  not  like  the  Bible ;  he 
is  like  common  speech.  From  the  very  na- 
ture of  his  subjects  his  quotations  from  the 
Bible  are  exceptionally  frequent;  but  their 
effect  on  his  own  style  is  no  less  exceptionally 
small.  No  man  of  letters  using  the  Bible  so 
much  and  so  exclusively  could  well  have  felt 

102 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

its  style  so  little.  The  last  thing  in  the  Bible 
that  affected  Bunyan  was  its  style.  To  him 
its  subject  was  too  overwhelming  to  leave 
much  room  for  other  impressions.  To  him 
it  was  simply  the  word  of  God.  But  for  a 
few  sentences  of  his,  we  could  hardly  be 
sure  that  he  was  even  aware  it  had  a 
style. 

One  of  the  surest  and  most  delicate  tests  is 
his  susceptibility  to  its  rhythm  and  other  har- 
monies; for  the  influence  of  the  Bible  style 
on  other  styles  is  clearest  in  this  one  quality. 
To  use  instances  widely  different,  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  and  John  Ruskin  both  echo  at  im- 
passioned moments  the  grand  cadences  of 
the  English  translation  of  the  minor  prophets. 
But  Bunyan  seems  rather  deaf  to  these.  His 
rhythms  seem  very  slightly  affected  by  the 
rhythms  of  the  English  Bible.1  Rather  they 
are  the  simpler,  more  spontaneous  rhythms 

1  This  in  spite  of  Professor  Dowden's  assertion 
(Puritan  and  Anglican,  page  249)  that  "their  music 
lived  within  the  cells  of  his  fancy,"  whatever  that 
may  mean. 

103 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

of  communal  emotion,  the  prose  poetry  of 
common  feeling.1 

As  if  to  confirm  the  conclusion  that  Bun- 
yan's  style  was  not  formed  on  the  English 
Bible,  he  has  another  trait  which,  though 
hardly  marked  by  critics,  is  none  the  less  re- 
markable. His  style  is  highly  alliterative. 
Rhythm  seems  to  have  meant  little  to  him, 
and  the  rhythms  of  the  English  Bible  still 
less;  but  alliteration  evidently  meant  much. 
His  associations  of  words  seem  to  have  sprung 
less  from  cadence  and  measure  than  from 
initial  sounds.  Both  kinds  of  recurrence, 
both  rhythm  and  alliteration,  may  of  course 
be  traced  in  classic  English  prose  as  elements 
of  its  harmony,  and  had  a  great  deal  more, 
doubtless,  to  do  with  the  actual  composition 
than  we  are  wont  to  assume ;  but  in  Bunyan's 
mind  rhythm  seems  to  have  meant  compara- 
tively little,  and  alliteration  correspondingly 
much. 

1  Some  readers  will  find  incidental  corroboration 
of  this  in  metrical  rhythms  such  as  "  neither  afraid 
of  the  chain  nor  cage,  nor  yet  of  bloody  death,"  and 
will  remember  Charles  Dickens. 

104 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

"So  Christian  turned  out  of  his  way  to  go  to 
Mr.  Legality's  house  for  help ;  but  behold,  when 
he  was  now  got  hard  by  the  /till,  it  seemed  so 
/ugh,  and  also  that  side  of  it  that  was  next  the 
wayside  did  hang  so  much  over,  that  Christian 
was  afraid  to  venture  further,  lest  the  hu\  should 
fall  on  his  head.'*  "After  a  kittle  faying  of  tetters 
together,  he  found  .  .  .  that  was  the  pillar  of 
salt  into  which  Xot's  wife  was  turned  when  she 
was  going  to  Sodom  for  safety,  which  sudden  and 
amazing  sight,"  etc.  "I  cannot  tell  who  to  com- 
pare them  to  so  fitly  as  to  them  that  pick  pockets 
in  the  presence  of  the  judge,  or  that  will  cut  purses 
under  the  gallows.  It  is  said  of  the  men  of  Sodom 
that  they  were  sinners  exceedingly  because  they 
were  sinners  before  the  Lord."  (The  latter  al- 
literation is  adopted  from  the  Bible,  but  increased.) 
Giant  Despair  "gretteth  him  a  grievous  crab- tree 
cudgel,  and  goes  down."  Little  Faith  "was  one 
of  the  weak,  and  therefore  he  went  to  the  walls." 

Quotations  might  easily  be  multiplied, 
and  many  instances  are  more  delicate;  but 
the  last  one  gives  the  clue.  "Went  to  the 
walls"  is  a  proverbial  phrase.  Bunyan's 
speech  is  highly  proverbial;    and  English 

105 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

proverbial  expressions  are  quite  commonly 
alliterative.  It  was  very  probably  his  inti- 
macy with  common  speech  that  made  his 
associations  habitually  alliterative;  or,  to 
put  it  the  other  way,  his  alliteration  is  one  of 
the  signs  that  his  style  is  oral.  When  Bun- 
yan  wrote  "he  espied  a  /oul  fiend  coming 
over  the  field,"  he  echoed  a  traditional  com- 
bination of  words  almost  as  old  as  English; 
and  he  echoed  it  almost  certainly  from  oral 
tradition.  Here  is  a  link  in  the  unseen  chain 
of  human  speech  suddenly  made  visible. 
It  suggests  how  intensely  national,  how 
intensely  English,  is  this  man  who,  receiv- 
ing his  mother  tongue  from  his  mother's 
lips,  handed  on  what  he  received,  —  not 
English  changed  or  fixed  by  books,  but 
English  spoken  by  the  forefathers. 

We  cannot  regard  as  accidental,  then,  the 
likeness  of  certain  finer  passages  to  the  older 
English  poetry,  and  even  sometimes  to  the 
very  staves  of  oldest  English:  "Thus  man, 
while  blind,  doth  wander,  but  wearieth  him- 
self with  vanity ;  for  he  knoweth  not  the  way 

106 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

to  the  city  of  God."  "Fear  /ollowed  me  so 
hard  that  I  fled  the  next  way."  And  the 
lovely  opening  of  this  great  vision  recalls  the 
opening  of  another  vision,  written  three  cen- 
turies before  for  common  men  in  the  common 
speech  by  another  English  prophet,  —  the 
Vision  of  Piers  Plowman.  "As  I  walked," 
says  the  Pilgrim  — 

"  As  I  walked  through  the  wilderness  of  this  world, 
I  Zighted  on  a  certain  place  where  was  a  den. 
And  I  Zaid  me  down  in  that  place  to  sleep  ; 
And  as  I  slept  I  dreamed  a  dream." 

Now  hear  the  far  voice  of  the  Ploughman : 

"  I  was  wery  forwandred,  and  went  me  to  reste 
Under  a  6rode  6ank  by  a  Jornes  side. 
And  as  I  Zay  and  Zened  and  Zoked  in  the  wateres, 
I  slombered  in  a  slepyng,  it  sweyved  so  merye. " 

No,  in  the  last  analysis,  Bunyan's  style  is 
as  unliterary  as  possible,  as  uninfluenced  by 
literature,  as  true  to  the  ways  of  common 
spoken  speech,  —  in  a  word,  as  oral  as  any 
style  that  was  ever  put  into  a  book.  It  is 
the  speech  of  a  genius ;  but  it  is  still  common 

107 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

speech.  It  is  common  speech  transmuted 
by  an  intense  originality.  As  the  artistic  ex- 
pressive instinct  of  other  authors  uses  their 
literary  inheritance  in  ways  so  individual  as 
to  show  their  own  creative  originality,  so  Bun- 
yan  used  the  popular  oral  inheritance.  There 
is  his  originality.  He  used  the  common 
speech;  but  he  used  it  as  it  had  never  been 
used  before.  He  talked  like  Tom,  Dick,  and 
Harry;  but  he  talked  as  they  could  never 
dream  of  talking,  in  that  he  talked  like  him- 
self. 

Perhaps  it  is  not  insisting  too  much  to  add 
that  only  so  could  he  have  talked  like  him- 
self. He  could  hardly  have  talked  like  books 
without  turning  aside  to  think  of  style. 
Books  are  so  large  a  part  of  the  lives  of  most 
authors  that  literary  diction  can  pass  into 
their  styles  naturally,  without  deliberate  arti- 
fice; books  were  so  small  a  part  of  his  life 
that  they  could  not  well  have  passed  into  his 
style  without  conscious  effort  to  make  style. 
Any  such  effort  would  have  violated  his  sin- 
cerity.    Sincerity   is   the   touchstone   of   all 

108 


THE  SECRET  OF  JOHN  BUNYAN 

great  style;  but  in  Bunyan  it  is  so  nearly 
pure  as  almost  to  constitute  his  greatness. 
His  style  is  so  nearly  a  pure  medium,  so 
nearly  the  absolute,  unaffected  expression 
of  himself,  that  one  can  hardly  refrain  from 
calling  it  perfect.  Its  crowning  merit  is  that 
it  cannot  long  be  thought  of  as  style.  Come 
to  him  as  you  will;  examine  his  expression 
critically  as  a  work  of  art;  you  will  not  be 
long  in  forgetting  everything  but  his  message. 
He  compels  you  to  forget  his  language,  to  for- 
get himself,  to  forget  everything  but  the  un- 
seen things  which  are  eternal.  His  style  is 
a  moral  victory.  Born  an  artist,  he  spent 
his  life  in  sacrificing  his  art  to  the  glory  of 
God  and  the  salvation  of  men.  That  is  why 
The  Pilgrim's  Progress  is  at  once  our  great 
religious  and  our  great  popular  classic. 


109 


Three  Studies  In  The 
Short  Story 

I.  THE  QUESTION  OF  DERIVATION 

Questions  of  literary  derivation  can- 
not be  finally  answered  for  the  tale,  any 
more  than  for  other  literary  forms,  without 
large  citation  and  analysis  in  particular.  But, 
a  review  for  types,  an  attempt  to  classify 
the  late  Greek,  late  Latin,  and  medieval 
forms  may  now  advance  such  discussion  by 
helping  to  revise  its  hypothesis.  Stories 
being  primarily  for  pleasure,  and  the  pleasure 
of  decadent  Greece  being  largely  carnal,  it 
can  give  no  long  amazement  to  find  that  the 
tales  popular  beside  the  Mediterranean  of 
the  Seleucids  and  the  Ptolemies  were  erotic 
and  often  frankly  obscene.  Known  as  Mile- 
sian tales,  doubtless  from  the  bad  eminence 
of  some  collection  in  the  Ionian  city  of  plea- 
sure, they  set  a  fashion  for  those  Roman 
studies  in  the  naturally  and  the  unnaturally 

110 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

sexual  of  which  the  type  is  the  Satyricon  of 
Petronius.  The  famous  tale  of  the  Matron 
of  Ephesus,  which  has  more  consistency 
than  most  of  this  collection,  reveals  at 
once  how  far  such  pieces  went  in  narrative 
form.  Clearly  a  capital  plot  for  a  short 
story,  it  is  just  as  clearly  not  a  short  story,1 
but  only  a  plot.  It  is  like  a  modern  narra- 
tive sketch  or  study,  like  the  scenario  for  a 
play.  And  in  this  it  is  as  other  tales  of  its 
class.  The  rest,  the  majority,  are  simply 
anecdote.  They  are  such  stories  as  men  of 
free  life  and  free  speech  have  in  all  ages  told 
after  dinner.  That  is  their  character  of  sub- 
ject ;  that  is  their  capacity  of  form.  For  the 
narrative  compactness  and  finish  conspicu- 
ous in  the  fifteenth  idyll  of  Theocritus,  in  the 
anecdote  opening  the  seventh  oration  of  Dio 
Chrysostom,  and  in  a  few  other  late  Greek 
and  Latin  instances  of  the  short-story  man- 
ner, startle  the  modern  investigator  precisely 

1  The  distinction  implied  here  rests  upon  that  stand- 
ard exposition,  The  Philosophy  of  the  Short-Story,  by 
Professor  Brander  Matthews. 

Ill 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

because  they  are  exceptional.  Speaking 
broadly,  the  short  tales  of  antiquity  are  never 
short  stories  in  our  modern  sense.  They  are 
either  anecdote  or  scenario. 

Of  the  longer  tale  of  antiquity  a  convenient 
type  is  the  Daphnis  and  Chloe  ascribed  to 
Longus.  A  plot  no  less  ancient  than  that 
of  the  foundling  reared  in  simple  life  and 
ultimately  reclaimed  by  noble  parents  re- 
ceives from  the  Greek  author  the  form  of  a 
pastoral  romance,  with  episodes,  complica- 
tions, and  a  fairy-tale  ending.  This  form 
persists  in  the  short  romances  of  the  middle 
age.  The  type  is  clear  in  the  most  familiar 
of  these,  such  as  Amis  and  Amiloun.  As  at 
the  close  of  the  ancient  time  an  author  here 
and  there  had  tried  the  terser  form  which  we 
now  call  short  story,  so  in  the  middle  age. 
That  extraordinary  group  of  Anglo-Norman 
writers  who  in  the  twelfth  century  made  the 
English  court  a  centre  of  literary  influence 
was  composed  of  conscious  literary  artists. 
And  one  man  among  them  achieved  in  Latin 
prose  two  short  stories  as  distinct  and  in- 

112 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

genious  in  form  as  any  ever  achieved  in 
modern  times.  That  man  was  Walter  Map. 
His  name  has  been  so  long  a  battle-ground 
of  theorists  upon  the  cycles  of  long  romances 
that  his  undisputed  pieces  of  short  narrative, 
collected  in  the  volume  now  known  as  De 
Nugis  Curialium,  have  been  unduly  neg- 
lected. Attentive  reading  of  that  volume 
reveals  Map  experimenting  in  several  dis- 
tinct forms  of  tale,  and  recognizes  among 
these  experiments  two  short  stories  of  con- 
summate workmanship  in  the  form  —  De 
Societate  Sadii  et  Galonis,  and  De  Sceva  et 
Ollone  Mercatoribus.  But  Map's  literary 
discovery  was  not  followed  up.  It  had  no 
discernible  literary  influence.  The  time  of 
the  short-story  form  as  a  distinct  literary 
method  was  postponed  for  centuries. 

Meantime  the  typical  medieval  form  for 
short  narratives  remained  what  we  see  in 
Amis  and  Amiloun,  the  short  romance  or  tale. 
Between  such  typical  short  romances  and 
the  modern  short  story  there  is  the  same  dif- 
ference of  form  as  between  Chaucer's  tale  of 


113 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

the  Man  of  Law,  which  is  one  of  the  former, 
and  his  tale  of  the  Pardoner,  which  fore- 
shadows how  such  material  may  be  handled 
in  the  way  of  the  latter.  For  Chaucer,  as  in 
his  Troilus  and  Criseyde  he  anticipates  the 
modern  novel,  so  in  his  Pardoner  anticipates 
the  modern  short  story.  The  middle  age  and 
the  Renaissance,  like  antiquity,  show  isolated, 
sporadic  instances  of  short  story,  whether  in 
prose  or  in  verse ;  but  these  are  apart  from  the 
drift  of  the  time.  Aside  from  such  sporadic 
cases,  the  medieval  tale  or  short  romance 
shows  no  advance  in  narrative  form.  For 
the  tale  is  a  constant  form  from  Greece  — 
even  from  India  and  Egypt,  down  to  the 
present.  In  form  the  Alexandrian  Daphnis 
and  Chloe,  the  medieval  Amis  and  Amiloun, 
and  the  whole  herd  of  modern  tales,  such  as 
Miss  Edgeworth's,  are  essentially  alike.  The 
modern  time  has  differentiated  two  forms: 
first,  the  novel,  in  which  character  is  progres- 
sively developed,  incidents  progressively  com- 
plicated and  resolved;  second,  the  short 
story,  in  which  character  and  action  are  so 


114 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

compressed  as  to  suggest  by  a  single  situation 
without  development.  The  former  is  as  it 
were  an  expansion  of  the  tale;  the  latter,  a 
compression.  In  both  cases  the  modern  art 
of  fiction  seems  to  have  learned  from  the 
drama.  Meantime  the  original,  naive  form 
has  endured,  and  doubtless  will  endure.  To 
employ  the  figure  of  speech  by  which  M. 
Brunetiere  is  enabled  to  speak  of  literature 
in  terms  of  evolution,  the  tale  is  the  original 
jackal.  From  it  have  been  developed  two 
distinct  species;  but  their  parent  stock  per- 
sists. Indeed,  for  aught  we  can  see  from  the 
past,  posterity  may  behold  a  reversion  to  type. 
The  exceptions  to  this  traditional  mode, 
striking  as  they  seem  to  us,  in  no  case 
gained  vogue  enough  to  fix  a  new  type. 
For  the  middle  age,  then,  the  twofold  divi- 
sion into  anecdote  and  summary  romance 
will  include  practically  all  short  narratives. 
Both  the  division  and  the  sporadic  excep- 
tions are  clear  in  the  greatest  medieval  collec- 
tion, the  Decameron  (1353)  of  Boccaccio. 
More  than  half  the  tales  of  the  Decameron 


115 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

may  readily  be  grouped  as  anecdote  —  all  of 
the  sixth  day,  for  instance,  most  of  the  first 
and  eighth,  half  of  the  ninth.  Of  these  some 
approach  consistency  of  form.  Having  long 
introductions,  unnecessary  lapse  of  time,  or 
other  looseness  of  structure,  they  still  work 
out  a  main  situation  in  one  day  or  one  night ; 
they  sometimes  show  dramatic  ingenuity  of 
incident;  less  frequently  they  reach  distinct 
climax.  Where  the  climax,  as  in  the  majority 
of  cases,  is  merely  an  ingenious  escape  or  a 
triumphant  retort,  of  course  the  tale  remains 
simply  anecdote ;  but  in  some  few  the  climax 
is  the  result  of  the  action,  is  more  nearly  a 
culmination.  This  is  the  character  of  the 
seventh  day.  The  other  type  of  the  Deca- 
meron rapidly  summarizes  a  large  plot,  the 
action  ranging  widely  in  time  and  place.  A 
narrative  sketch,  usually  of  a  romance,  it  cor- 
responds essentially  to  the  Amis  and  Amiloun 
type,1  and  includes  nearly  one  half.     Here 

i  This,  perhaps,  is  typically  the  novella  ;  but  Boc- 
caccio will  not  fix  the  term  :  "  intendo  di  raccontare 
cento  novelle  o  favole  o  parabole  o  istorie,  che  dire 

116 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

was  an  open  mine  for  the  romantic  drama 
of  later  centuries.  The  Decameron,  then, 
is  almost  all  either  anecdote  or  summary 
romance. 

But  not  quite  all.  Besides  those  tales 
which  seem  to  show  a  working  for  consis- 
tency, there  are  a  few  that  definitely  achieve 
it.  The  fourth  of  the  first  day  (The  Monk, 
the  Woman,  and  the  Abbot)  is  compact 
within  one  place  and  a  few  hours.  All  it 
lacks  for  short  story  is  definite  climax.  Very 
like  in  compactness  is  the  first  of  the  second 
day  (The  Three  Florentines  and  the  Body 
of  the  New  Saint).  Firmer  still  is  the  eighth 
of  the  eighth  day  (Two  Husbands  and  Two 
Wives).  Here  the  climax  is  not  only  definite, 
but  is  a  solution,  and  includes  all  four  char- 
acters. If  it  is  not  convincing,  that  is  be- 
cause the  Decameron  is  hardly  concerned  with 
characterization.  The  action  covers  two 
days.  It  might  almost  as  easily  have  been 
kept  within  one.     Finally  there  are  two  tales 

le  vogliamo  .  .  .  nelle  quali  novelle  .  .  "  Preface  to 
the  Decameron. 


117 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

that  cannot,  without  hair-splitting,  be  dis- 
tinguished from  modern  short  story.  The 
second  tale  of  the  second  day  (Rinaldo,  for 
his  prayer  to  St.  Julian,  well  lodged  in  spite 
of  mishap)  is  compressed  within  a  single 
afternoon  and  night  and  a  few  miles  of  a 
single  road.  The  climax  is  definitely  a  solu- 
tion. The  movement  is  largely  by  dialogue. 
In  a  word,  the  tale  is  a  self-consistent  whole. 
Equally  self-consistent,  and  quite  similar  in 
method,  is  that  farce  comedy  of  errors,  the 
sixth  tale  of  the  ninth  day  (Two  Travellers 
in  a  Room  of  Three  Beds),  which  Chaucer 
has  among  his  Canterbury  Tales.  Both 
these  are  short  stories.  If  the  other  three  be 
counted  with  them,  we  have  five  out  of  a 
hundred.1 

1  For  reference  in  more  detailed  study  of  medieval 
forms,  this  tentative  classification  of  the  Decameron 
may  be  tabulated  as  follows  :  — 

anecdote 55 

(a)  simple  anecdote 34' 

I,  all  but  nov.  4 ;  III,  nov.  4 ;  V, 

nov.  4  ;  VI,  entire  ;  VIII,  all  but 
nov.  7  &  8 ;  IX,  nov.  1  &  7-10. 

(b)  anecdote  more  artistically  elaborated      21. 

118 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

The  middle  age,  then,  had  the  short  story, 
but  did  not  recognize,  or  did  not  value,  that 
opportunity.  Not  only  does  Boccaccio  em- 
ploy the  form  seldom  and,  as  it  were,  quite 
casually,  but  subsequent  writers  do  not  carry 
it  forward.  In  fact,  they  practically  ignore 
it.  Les  cent  nouvelles  nouvelles  (1450-1460), 
most  famous  of  French  collections,  shows  no 
discernment  of  Boccaccio's  nicer  art.  In 
form,  as  in  subject,  there  is  no  essential 
change  from  the  habit  of  antiquity.  True, 
here  and  there  among  the  everlasting  his- 
toires  grivoises  is  a  piece  of  greater  consis- 
tency and  artistic  promise.     That  delicious 

III,  nov.  1,  2,  3,  5,  6  ;  V,  nov.  10; 
VII,  entire ;  VIII,  nov.  7  ;  IX, 
nov.  2-5. 

summary  romance  or  tale 40 

II,  nov.  3-10  ;  III,  nov.  7-10 ;  IV, 
entire  ;  V,  all  but  nov.  4  &  10 ; 
X,  entire. 
approaching  short  story 3 

I,  nov.  4 ;  II,  nov.  1 ;  VIII,  nov.  8. 

short  story 2 

II.  nov.  2  ;  IX,  nov.  6.  

100 


119 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

story  (the  sixth  nouvelle)  of  the  drunken  man 
who  insisted  on  making  his  confession  on  the 
highway  to  a  priest  unfortunately  passing, 
who  had  absolution  at  the  point  of  the  knife, 
and  then  resolved  to  die  before  he  lapsed  from 
the  state  of  grace,  is  not  only  a  short-story 
plot;  it  goes  so  far  toward  short-story  form 
as  to  focus  upon  a  few  hours.  Yet  even  this 
hints  the  short  story  to  us  because  we  look 
back  from  the  achieved  form.  After  all,  it 
remains  anecdote ;  and  it  has  few  peers  in  all 
the  huge  collection.  Bandello  (1480-1562), 
in  this  regard,  shows  even  a  retrogression 
from  Boccaccio.  His  brief  romances  are 
looser,  often  indeed  utterly  extravagant  of 
time  and  space.  His  anecdotes,  though  they 
often  have  a  stir  of  action,  show  less  sense  of 
bringing  people  together  on  the  stage.  So 
the  Heptameron  (1558-1559)  of  the  Queen 
of  Navarre  fails  —  so  in  general  subsequent 
tale-mongers  fail  —  to  appreciate  the  dis- 
tinctive value  of  the  terser  form.  Up  to  the 
nineteenth  century  the  short  story  was  merely 
sporadic.     It  was  achieved  now  and  again  by 

120 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

writers  of  too  much  artistic  sense  to  be  quite 
unaware  of  its  value ; *  but  it  never  took  its 
place  as  an  accepted  form. 

Thus  the  modern  development  of  the  short 
story  in  France  has  both  its  own  artistic  in- 
terest and  the  further  historical  interest  of 
background.  When  Charles  Nodier  (1783- 
1844),  in  the  time  of  our  own  Irving,  harked 
back  from  the  novel  to  the  tale,  he  but  fol- 
lowed consciously  what  others  had  followed 
unconsciously,  a  tradition  of  his  race.  Some 
of  Nodier's  legends  are  as  medieval  in  form 
as  in  subject.  But  when  he  wrote  La  combe 
a  Vhomme  mort  he  made  of  the  same  material 
something  which,  emerging  here  and  there 
in  the  middle  age,  waited  for  definite  accept- 
ance till  Nodier's  own  time  —  a  short  story. 
The  hypothesis  that  Nodier  was  a  master  to 
Hawthorne  is  not  supported  by  any  close  like- 
ness. Yet  there  are  resemblances.  Both 
loved  to  write  tales  for  children ;  both  lapse 
toward  the  overt  moral  and  fall  easily  into 

i  For  instance,  by  Diderot,  in  the  tale  of  Mme.  de 
Pommeraye,  discussed  at  page  60. 

121 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

essay;  both  use  the  more  compact  short- 
story  form  as  it  were  by  the  way  and  not  from 
preference.  Smarra  (66  pages,  1821),  ac- 
knowledging a  suggestion  from  Apuleius,  is 
an  essentially  original  fantasy,  creating  the 
effect  of  a  waking  dream.  The  nearest  Eng- 
lish parallel  is,  not  Hawthorne,  but  De 
Quincey,  or,  in  more  elaborate  and  restrained 
eloquence,  Landor.  Smarra,  as  Nodier  says 
in  his  preface,  is  an  exercise  in  style  to  pro- 
duce a  certain  phantasmagorical  impression. 
The  clue  to  the  effect  he  sought  is  given  by 
the  frequent  quotations  from  the  Tempest. 
It  is  "such  stuff  as  dreams  are  made  on." 
Jean  Francois-les-bas-bleus  (1836)  and  Lidi- 
vine,  on  the  other  hand,  are  almost  docu- 
mentary studies  of  character.  La  filleule  du 
Seigneur  (1806),  legendary  anecdote  like 
Irving's,  shows  where  Nodier's  art  began. 
He  carried  his  art  much  further;  but  his 
pieces  of  compactness,  like  La  combe  a 
Vhomme  mort,  are  so  rare  that  one  may  doubt 
their  direct  influence  on  the  modern  develop- 
ment of  form. 


122 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

For  the  bulk  of  Nodier's  work  is  not  conte, 
but  nouvelle.  These  two  terms  have  never 
been  sharply  differentiated  in  French  use. 
Les  cent  nouvelles  nouvelles  are  not  only 
shorter,  in  average,  than  the  novelle  of  Boc- 
caccio ;  they  are  substantially  like  the  Conies 
de  la  Reine  de  Navarre.  Some  of  the  nou- 
velles of  Nodier,  Merimee,  and  Gautier  are 
indistinguishable  in  form  from  the  contes  of 
Flaubert,  Daudet,  and  Maupassant.  But 
though  even  to-day  a  collection  of  French 
tales  might  bear  either  name,  the  short  story 
as  it  grew  in  distinctness  and  popularity 
seems  to  have  taken  more  peculiarly  to  itself 
the  name  conte.  Correspondingly  nouvelle 
is  a  convenient  name  for  those  more  extended 
tales,  written  sometimes  in  chapters,  which 
in  English  are  occasionally  called  novelettes, 
and  which  have  their  type  in  Amis  and 
Amiloun.  In  this  sense  Nodier's  writing 
is  mainly,  and  from  preference,  nouvelle. 
Taking  as  his  type  for  modern  adaptation 
the  medieval  tale,  he  did  not  work  in  the 
direction  of  short  story. 

123 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


Nor,  oddly  enough,  did  Merimee.     People 
who  assign  to  him  the  role  of  pioneer  in  the 
short  story,  on  account  of  his  extraordinary 
narrative  conciseness,  appear  to  forget  that 
his  typical  tales  —  Carmen,  Colombo,,  Arsene 
Guillot,  are  too  long  for  the  form ;  and  that 
many  of  his  shorter  pieces  —  U  enlevement 
de  la  redoute,  Tamango,  La  vision  de  Charles 
XI.,  are  deliberately  composed  as  descrip- 
tive anecdotes.    Merimee's  compactness  con- 
sists rather  in  reducing  to  a  nouvelle  what 
most  writers  would  have  made  a  roman  than 
in  focusing  on  a  single  situation  in  a  conte. 
Carmen,  though  compact  in  its  main  struc- 
ture, has  a  long  prelude.     Beyond  question 
the  method  is  well  adapted ;  but  it  shows  no 
tendency  to  short  story.     And  the  habit  is 
equally  marked  in  Le  vase  Hrusque,  with  its 
superfluous    characters.     Evidently   his    ar- 
tistic bent,  like  Hawthorne's,  like  Nodier's, 
was  not  in  that  direction.     All  the  more  strik- 
ing, therefore,  are  his  few  experiments.     La 
Venus  d'llle   (1837)  is  definitely  and  per- 
fectly a  short  story.     Giving  the  antecedent 

124 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

action  and  the  key  in  skilful  opening  dia- 
logue, it  proceeds  by  a  series  of  increasingly 
stronger  premonitions  to  a  seizing  climax. 
Like  Poe,  Merimee  intensifies  a  mood  till  it 
can  receive  whatever  he  chooses,  but  not  at 
all  in  Poe's  way.  Instead,  the  mystery  and 
horror  are  accentuated  by  a  tone  of  worldly- 
wise  skepticism.  Less  compressed,  too, 
than  Poe,  he  can  be  more  " natural."  Withal 
he  keeps  the  same  perfection  of  grading. 
Strange  that  a  man  who  did  this  once  should 
not  have  done  it  oftener.  But  the  single 
achievement  was  marked  enough  to  compel 
imitation. 

That  the  propagation  of  the  short  story  in 
France  owes  much  to  Balzac  might  readily 
be  presumed  from  the  enormous  influence 
of  Balzac's  work  in  general,  but  can  hardly 
be  held  after  scrutiny  of  his  short  pieces  in 
particular.  Of  these,  two  will  serve  to  recall 
the  limitations  of  the  great  observer.  El 
Verdugo  (1829),  though  it  is  reduced  to  two 
days  and  substantially  one  scene,  hardly 
realizes   the   gain   from   such   compression. 

125 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Instead  of  intensifying  progressively,  Balzac 
has  at  last  to  append  his  conclusion,  and  for 
lack  of  gradation  to  leave  his  tale  barely 
credible.  Les  Proscrits  (1831),  more  unified 
in  imaginative  conception,  and  again  limited 
in  time-lapse,  again  fails  of  that  progressive 
intensity  which  is  the  very  essence  of  Poe's 
force  and  Merimee's.  It  is  not  even  held 
steady,  but  lapses  into  intrusive  erudition  and 
falls  into  three  quite  separate  scenes.  Others 
of  Balzac's  short  pieces,  La  messe  de  Vatliee 
(1836),  for  example,  and  Z.  Marcas  (1840), 
are  obviously  in  form,  like  many  of  Haw- 
thorne's, essays  woven  on  anecdote  or  char- 
acter. Some  of  his  tales  may,  indeed,  have 
suggested  the  opportunity  of  different  hand- 
ling. Some  of  them,  at  any  rate,  seem  from 
our  point  of  view  almost  to  call  for  that.  But 
his  own  handling  does  not  seem,  as  Poe's 
does,  directive.  And  in  general,  much  as 
Balzac  had  to  teach  his  successors,  had  he 
much  to  teach  them  of  form  ? 

The  tales  of  Musset,  which  are  but  inci- 
dental in  his  development,  and  are  confined, 

126 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

most  of  them,  within  the  years  1837-1838, 
show  no  grasp  of  form.  Gautier,  even  more 
evidently  than  Merimee,  preferred  the  nou- 
velle.  Few  even  of  his  most  compact  conies, 
such  as  Le  nid  de  rossignols,  compress  the 
time.  He  was  garrulous ;  he  had  read  Sterne; 1 
above  all,  he  was  bent,  like  Sterne,  on  de- 
scription. But  Gautier  too  shows  a  striking 
exception.  La  morte  amour  euse,  though  it 
has  not  Poe's  mechanism  of  compression,  is 
otherwise  so  startlingly  like  Poe  that  one 
turns  instinctively  to  the  dates.  La  morte 
amour euse  appeared  in  1836;  Berenice,  in 
1835.  The  Southern  Literary  Messenger 
could  not  have  touched  the  boulevards  in  a 
year.  Indeed,  the  debt  of  either  country  to 
the  other  can  hardly  be  proved.  Remark- 
able as  is  the  coincident  appearance  in  Paris 
and  in  Richmond  of  a  new  literary  form,  it 
remains  a  coincidence. 

The  history  of  the  tale  in  England,  how- 
ever important  otherwise,  is  hardly  distinct 
enough  as  a  development  of  form  to  demand 

1  See  page  63. 
127 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

separate  discussion  here.  For  England,  ap- 
parently trying  the  short-story  form  later 
than  France  and  the  United  States,  appar- 
ently also  learned  it  from  them.  Perhaps  the 
foremost  short-story  writers  of  our  time  in 
English  —  though  that  must  still  be  a  moot 
point  —  are  Kipling  and  Stevenson.  But 
Stevenson's  short  story  looks  to  France ;  and 
Kipling  probably  owes  much  to  the  American 
magazine.  Without  venturing  on  the  more 
complicated  question  of  the  relations  of  Ger- 
many, Russia,  and  Scandinavia  to  France, 
it  is  safe  to  put  forward  as  a  working  hy- 
pothesis that  the  new  form  was  fixed  by 
France  and  America,  and  by  each  independ- 
ently for  itself.  Our  priority,  if  it  be  sub- 
stantiated, can  be  but  of  a  year  or  two.  The 
important  fact  is  that  after  due  incubation 
the  new  form,  in  each  country,  has  germi- 
nated and  spread  with  extraordinary  vigor. 
Daudet,  Richepin,  Maupassant  —  to  make 
a  list  of  French  short-story  writers  in  the  time 
just  past,  is  to  include  almost  all  writers  of 
eminence  in  fiction.     What  is  true  of  France 


128 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

is  even  more  obviously  true  of  the  United 
States.  Our  most  familiar  names  in  recent 
fiction  were  made  familiar  largely  through 
distinction  in  the  short  story.  The  native 
American  yarn,  still  thriving  in  spontaneous 
oral  vigor,  has  been  turned  to  various  art 
in  The  Jum'ping  Frog  and  Marjorie  Daw  and 
The  Wreck  of  the  Thomas  Hyke.  The  capa- 
city of  the  short  story  for  focusing  interest 
dramatically  on  a  strictly  limited  scene  and 
a  few  hours,  no  less  than  its  capacity  for  fix- 
ing local  color,  is  exhibited  most  strikingly 
in  the  human  significance  of  Posson  Jone. 
Mr.  James,  though  his  preoccupation  with 
scientific  analysis  demands  typically,  as  it 
demanded  of  Merimee,  a  somewhat  larger 
scope,  vindicates  his  skill  more  obviously  in 
such  intense  pieces  of  compression  as  The 
Great  Good  Place.  To  instance  further 
would  but  lead  into  catalogue.  In  a  word, 
the  two  nations  that  have  in  our  time  shown 
keenest  consciousness  of  form  in  fiction  have 
most  fostered  the  short  story.  For  ourselves, 
we  may  find  in  this  development  of  a  literary 

9  129 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

form  one  warrant  for  asserting  that  we  have 
a  literary  history. 

H.  THE  TALE  IN  AMERICA  BEFORE    1835 

HoW    FEW   YEARS    COMPRISE    THE   HISTORY 

of  American  literature  is  strikingly  sug- 
gested by  the  fact  that  so  much  of  it  can  be 
covered  by  the  reminiscence  of  a  single  man 
of  letters.1  A  life  beginning  in  the  '20's  had 
actual  touch  in  boyhood  with  Irving,  and 
seized  fresh  from  the  press  the  romances  of 
Cooper.  And  if  the  history  of  American 
literature  be  read  more  exclusively  as  the 
history  of  literary  development  essentially 
American,  its  years  are  still  fewer.  "I  per- 
ceive," says  a  foreign  visitor  in  Austin's  story 
of  Joseph  Natterstrom,  "this  is  a  very  young 
country,  but  a  very  old  people."  Some 
critics,  indeed,  have  been  so  irritated  by  the 
spreading  of  the  eagle  in  larger  pretensions  as 
to  deprecate  entirely  the  phrase  "American 
literature."     Our  literature,  they  retort,  has 

1  Donald  G.  Mitchell,  American  Lands  and  Letters. 
130 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

shown  no  national,  essential  difference  from 
the  literature  of  the  other  peoples  using  the 
same  language.  How  these  carpers  accom- 
modate to  their  view  Thoreau,  for  instance, 
is  not  clear.  But  waiving  other  claims,  the 
case  might  almost  be  made  out  from  the  in- 
digenous growth  of  one  literary  form.  Our 
short  story,  at  least,  is  definitely  American. 

The  significance  of  the  short  story  as  a  new 
form  of  fiction  appears  on  comparison  of  the 
staple  product  of  tales  before  1835  with  the 
staple  product  thereafter.  1835  is  the  date 
of  Poe's  Berenice.  Before  it  lies  a  period  of 
experiment,  of  turning  the  accepted  anec- 
dotes, short  romances,  historical  sketches, 
toward  something  vaguely  felt  after  as  more 
workmanlike.  This  is  the  period  of  preco- 
cious local  magazines,  and  of  that  ornament 
of  the  marble-topped  tables  of  our  grand- 
mothers, the  annual.  Various  in  name  and 
in  color,  the  annual  gift-books  are  alike, 
externally  in  profusion  of  design  and  gilding, 
internally  in  serving  up,  as  staples  of  their 
miscellany,    poems    and    tales.      Keepsakes 

131 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

they  were  called  generically  in  England, 
France,  and  America;  their  particular  style 
might  be  Garland  or  Gem.  The  Atlantic 
Souvenir,  earliest  in  this  country,  so  throve 
during  seven  years  (1826-1832)  as  to  buy 
and  unite  with  itself  (1833)  its  chief  rival, 
the  Token.  The  utterly  changed  taste  which 
smiles  at  these  annuals,  as  at  the  clothes  of 
their  readers,  obscures  the  fact  that  they  were 
a  medium,  not  only  for  the  stories  of  writers 
forgotten  long  since,  but  also  for  the  earlier 
work  of  Hawthorne.  By  1835  the  New  Eng- 
land Magazine  had  survived  its  infancy,  and 
the  Southern  Literary  Messenger  was  born 
with  promise.  Since  then  —  since  the  reali- 
zation of  the  definite  form  in  Poe's  Berenice, 
the  short  story  has  been  explored  and  tested 
to  its  utmost  capacity  by  almost  every  Ameri- 
can prose-writer  of  note,  and  by  many  with- 
out note,  as  the  chief  American  form  of 
fiction.  The  great  purveyor  has  been  the 
monthly  magazine.  Before  1835,  then,  is  a 
period  of  experiment  with  tales ;  after  1835,  a 
period  of  the  manifold  exercise  of  the  short 

132 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

story.  The  tales  of  the  former  have  much 
that  is  national  in  matter;  the  short  stories 
of  the  latter  show  nationality  also  in  form. 

Nationality,  even  provinciality,  in  subject- 
matter  has  been  too  much  in  demand.  The 
best  modern  literature  knows  best  that  it  is 
heir  of  all  the  ages,  and  that  its  goal  should 
be,  not  local  peculiarity,  but  such  humanity 
as  passes  place  and  time.  Therefore  we  have 
heard  too  much,  doubtless,  of  local  color.  At 
any  rate,  many  purveyors  of  local  color  in 
fiction  have  given  us  documents  rather  than 
stories.  Still  there  was  some  justice  in  ask- 
ing of  America  the  things  of  America.  If  the 
critics  who  begged  us  to  be  American  have 
not  always  seemed  to  know  clearly  what  they 
meant,  still  they  may  fairly  be  interpreted 
to  mean  in  general  something  reasonable 
enough,  —  namely,  that  we  ought  to  catch 
from  the  breadth  and  diversity  of  our  new 
country  new  inspirations.  The  world,  then, 
was  looking  to  us,  in  so  far  as  it  looked  at 
all,  for  the  impulse  from  untrodden  and  pict- 
uresque ways,  for  a  direct  transmission  of 

133 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Indians,  cataracts,  prairies,  bayous,  and 
Sierras.  Well  and  good.  But,  according 
to  our  abilities,  we  were  giving  the  world 
just  that.  Years  before  England  decided 
that  our  only  American  writers  in  this  sense 
were  Whitman,  Mark  Twain,  and  Bret  Harte, 
—  seventy  years  before  the  third  of  this  per- 
versely chosen  group  complacently  informed 
the  British  public  that  he  was  a  pioneer 
only  in  the  sense  of  making  the  short  story 
American  in  scenes  and  motives,  —  Amer- 
ican writers  were  exploring  their  country 
for  fiction  north  and  south,  east  and  west, 
up  and  down  its  history.  What  we  lacked 
was,  not  appreciation  of  our  material,  but 
skill  in  expressing  it;  not  inspiration,  but 
art.  We  had  to  wait,  not  indeed  for  Bret 
Harte  in  the  '60's,  but  for  Poe  in  the  '30's. 
The  material  was  known  and  felt,  and  again 
and  again  attempted.  Nothing  could  expose 
more  vividly  the  fallacy  that  new  material 
makes  new  literature.  We  were  at  school 
for  our  short  story;  but  we  had  long 
known  what    stories  we    had    to    tell.     In 


134 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


that    sense    American    fiction    has    always 
been  American. 

What  were  the  forms  of  this  evident  en- 
deavor to  interpret  American  life  in  brief 
fictions ;  and,  more  important,  what  was  the 
form  toward  which  they  were  groping  ?  For 
this  inquiry  the  natural  point  of  departure  is 
the  tales  of  Irving.  Any  reappreciation  of 
Irving  would  now  be  officious.  We  know 
that  classical  serenity,  alike  of  pathos  and  of 
humor ;  and  we  have  heard  often  enough  that 
he  got  his  style  of  Addison.  Indeed  no  at- 
tentive reader  of  English  literature  could  well 
fail  to  discern  either  Irving's  schooling  with 
the  finest  prose  of  the  previous  century  — 
with  Goldsmith,  for  instance,  as  well  as  Addi- 
son —  or  the  essential  originality  of  his  own 
prose.  He  is  a  pupil  of  the  Spectator.  That 
is  a  momentous  fact  in  the  history  of  Ameri- 
can literature.  We  know  what  it  means  in 
diction.  What  does  it  mean  in  form  ?  That 
our  first  eminent  short  fictions  were  written 
by  the  pupil  of  a  school  of  essayists  vitally 
affected  their  structure.     The  matter  of  the 

135 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Spectator  suggested  in  England  a  certain  type 
of  novel ;  its  manner  was  not  the  manner  to 
suggest  in  America  the  short  story,  even  to 
an  author  whose  head  was  full  of  the  proper 
material.  For  though  it  may  be  hard  to 
prove  in  the  face  of  certain  novels  that  an 
essay  is  one  thing  and  a  story  another,  it  is 
obvious  to  any  craftsman,  a  'priori,  that  the 
way  of  the  essay  will  not  lead  to  the  short 
story.  And  in  fact  it  did  not  lead  to  the 
short  story.  The  tales  of  Irving  need  no 
praise.  Composed  in  the  manner  typical 
of  the  short  story,  they  might  have  been  better 
or  worse;  but  they  are  not  so  composed.  It 
was  not  at  random  that  Irving  called  his  first 
collection  of  them  (1819-20)  The  Sketch 
Book.  The  Wife,  for  instance,  is  a  short- 
story  plot;  it  is  handled,  precisely  in  the 
method  of  the  British  essay,  as  an  illustrative 
anecdote.  So  The  Widow  and  Her  Son;  so 
The  Pride  of  the  Village,  most  evidently  in 
its  expository  introduction ;  so,  in  essence  of 
method,  many  of  the  others.  And  Rip  Van 
Winkle?     Here,  indeed,  is  a  difference,  but 


136 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

not,  as  may  at  first  appear,  a  significant  dif- 
ference. True,  the  descriptive  beginning  is 
modern  rather  than  Addisonian;  romanti- 
cism had  opened  the  eyes  of  the  son  of  the 
classicals;  but  how  far  the  typical  looseness 
of  romanticism  is  from  the  typical  compact- 
ness of  the  short  story  may  be  seen  in  Irving's 
German  tale  of  the  Spectre  Bridegroom,  and 
it  may  be  seen  here.  True  again,  the  char- 
acterization, though  often  expository,  is  deli- 
ciously  concrete;  but  it  is  not  more  so  than 
the  characterization  of  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley ; 
nor  is  Rip's  conversation  with  his  dog,  for 
instance,  in  itself  the  way  of  the  short  story 
any  more  than  Sir  Roger's  counting  of  heads 
in  church.  Unity  of  tone  there  is,  unity 
clearer  than  in  Irving's  models,  and  therefore 
doubtless  more  conscious.  But  Irving  did 
not  go  so  far  as  to  show  his  successors  that 
the  surer  way  to  unity  of  tone  is  unity  of  nar- 
rative form.  Still  less  did  he  display  the 
value  of  unity  of  form  for  itself.  His  stories 
do  not  culminate.  As  there  is  little  em- 
phasis on  any  given  incident,  so  there  is  no 

13T 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

direction  of  incidents  toward  a  single  goal  of 
action.  Think  of  the  Catskill  legend  done 
a  la  mode.  Almost  any  clever  writer  for  to- 
morrow's magazine  would  begin  with  Rip's 
awakening,  keep  the  action  within  one  day 
by  letting  the  previous  twenty  years  transpire 
through  Rip's  own  narrative  at  the  new 
tavern,  and  culminate  on  the  main  disclosure. 
That  he  might  easily  thus  spoil  Rip  Van 
Winkle  is  not  in  point.  The  point  is  that  he 
would  thus  make  a  typical  short  story,  and 
that  the  Sketch  Book  did  not  tend  in  that 
direction.  Nor  as  a  whole  do  the  Tales  of  a 
Traveller.  Not  only  is  Buckthorne  and  His 
Friends  avowedly  a  sketch  for  a  novel,  but 
the  involved  and  somewhat  laborious  ma- 
chinery of  the  whole  collection  will  not  serve 
to  move  any  of  its  separable  parts  in  the 
short-story  manner.  Even  the  German  Stu- 
dent, which  is  potentially  much  nearer  to 
narrative  singleness,  has  an  explanatory  in- 
troduction and  a  blurred  climax.  Such  few 
of  the  Italian  bandit  stories  as  show  com- 
pression of  time  remain  otherwise,  like  the 

138 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

rest,  essentially  the  same  in  form  as  other 
romantic  tales  of  the  period.  In  narrative 
adjustment  Irving  did  not  choose  to  make 
experiments. 

It  is  not  surprising,  therefore,  that  Irving's 
influence,  so  far  as  it  is  discernible  in  subse- 
quent short  fictions,  seems  rather  to  have 
retarded  than  to  have  furthered  the  develop- 
ment toward  a  distinct  form.  Our  native 
sense  of  form  appears  in  that  the  short  story 
emerged  fifteen  years  after  the  Sketch  Book; 
but  where  we  feel  Irving  we  feel  a  current 
from  another  source  moving  in  another  direc- 
tion. Rather  Irving  left  the  writers  for  the 
annuals  and  abortive  early  magazines  to  feel 
after  a  form.  What  were  the  modes  already 
accepted ;  and  what  were  their  several  capa- 
cities for  this  shaping  ?  The  moral  tale,  of 
course,  is  obvious  to  any  one  who  has  glanced 
over  the  literary  diversions  of  his  forbears ; 
and  this,  equally  of  course,  had  often  its  unity 
of  purpose.  But  since  the  message,  instead 
of  permeating  the  tale  by  suggestion,  was 
commonly  formulated  in  expository  introduc- 

139 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

tion  or  hortatory  conclusion,  it  did  not  suffice 
to  keep  the  whole  in  unity  of  form.  Indeed, 
the  moral  tale  was  hardly  a  form.  It  might 
be  mere  applied  anecdote ;  it  might  be  the 
bare  skeleton  of  a  story,  as  likely  material 
for  a  novel  as  for  a  short  story  ;  it  was  often 
shapeless  romance. 

Another  typical  ingredient  of  the  annual 
salad  is  the  yarn  or  hoax-story.  The  signifi- 
cance of  this  as  American  has  often  been 
urged ;  and  indeed  it  spread  with  little  seed- 
ing, and,  as  orally  spontaneous,  has  made  a 
favorite  diversion  of  the  frontier.  Its  signi- 
ficance in  form  is  that  it  absolutely  demands 
an  arrangement  of  incidents  for  suspense. 
The  superiority  of  form,  however,  was  asso- 
ciated, unfortunately  for  any  influence,  with 
triviality  of  matter.  Again,  the  annuals  are 
full  of  short  historical  sketches.  Sometimes 
these  are  mere  summary  of  facts  or  mere  anec- 
dote, to  serve  as  explanatory  text  for  the 
steel  engravings  then  fashionable  as  "  embel- 
lishments " ;  sometimes  they  are  humorous 
renderings  of  recent  events  ;  more  commonly 

140 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


they  are  painstaking  studies,  —  Delia  Bacon's, 
for  instance,  or  Charlotte  Sedgwick's,  in  the 
settino-  of  American  Colonial  and  Revolution- 
ary history ;  most  commonly  of  all,  whether 
native  or  foreign,  modern  or  medieval,  they 
are  thorough-going  romances,  running  often 
into  swashbuckling  and  almost  always  into 
melodrama.     The  tendency  to  melodramatic 
variety,  with  the  typical  looseness  of  roman- 
ticism, then  everywhere  dominant  in  letters, 
held  the  historical  sketches  back  from  com- 
pactness, or  even  definiteness,  of  form.     So 
clever  a  writer  as  Hall  leaves  many  of  his 
historical  pieces  with  the  ends  loose,  as  mere 
sketches  for  novels.     The  theoretical  differ- 
ence between  a  novelette  and  a  short  story 
is  thus  practically  evident  throughout  this 
phase  of  the  annuals  in  lack  of  focus. 

Still  the  studies  of  historical  environment 
were  more  promising  in  themselves  and  also 
confirmed  that  attempt  to  realize  the  local- 
ity, as  it  were,  of  the  present  or  the  imme- 
diate past  which  emerges  as  genre  or  local 
color.     The   intention   of    Miss   Sedgwick's 


141 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Reminiscence  of  Federalism  (1835)  is  the 
same  as  that  of  Miss  Wilkins's  stories  of  the 
same  environment.  Her  Mary  Dyre  comes 
as  near  in  form  as  Hawthorne's  Gentle  Boy 
to  extracting  the  essence  of  Quakerdom. 
Where  her  studies  fail  is  in  that  vital  inten- 
sity which  depends  most  of  all  on  compres- 
sion of  place  and  time.  Now  an  easier  way 
toward  this  was  open  through  the  more  de- 
scriptive sketch  of  local  manners.  To  realize 
the  genius  of  a  place  is  a  single  aim  ;  to 
keep  the  tale  on  the  one  spot  is  almost  a 
necessity ;  to  keep  it  within  a  brief  time  by 
focusing  on  one  significant  situation  is  a  fur- 
ther counsel  of  unity  which,  though  it  had 
not  occurred  to  American  writers  often, 
could  not  be  long  delayed.  Thus,  before 
1835,  Albert  Pike  had  so  far  focused  his  pict- 
uresque incidents  of  New  Mexico  as  to  burn 
an  impression  of  that  colored  frontier  life; 
and  James  Hall,  in  spite  of  the  bungling  un- 
necessary time-lapse,  had  so  turned  his  French 
Village  (1829)  as  to  give  a  single  picture  of 
French  colonial  manners. 


142 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Hawthorne,  indeed,  had  gone  farther.  His 
affecting  Wives  of  the  Dead  (1832)  is  brought 
within  the  compass  of  a  single  night.  If  the 
significance  of  this  experiment  was  clear  to 
Hawthorne,  then  he  must  have  abandoned 
deliberately  what  Poe  seized  as  vital ;  for  he 
recurred  to  the  method  but  now  and  then. 
The  trend  of  his  work  is  quite  different. 
But  there  is  room  to  believe  that  the  signif- 
icance of  the  form  escaped  him  ;  for  as  to 
literary  method,  as  to  form,  Hawthorne  seems 
not  to  see  much  farther  than  the  forgotten 
writers  whose  tales  stand  beside  his  in  the 
annuals.  An  obvious  defect  of  these  short 
fictions  is  in  measure.  The  writers  do  not 
distinguish  between  what  will  make  a  good 
thirty-page  story  and  what  will  make  a 
good  three-hundred-page  story.  They  can- 
not gauge  their  material.  Austin's  Peter 
Rugg  is  too  long  for  its  best  effect;  it  is 
definitely  a  short-story  plot.  Many  of  the 
others  are  far  too  short  for  any  clear  effect ; 
they  are  definitely  not  short-story  plots,  but 
novel  plots;    they  demand  development  of 

143 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

character  or  revolution  of  incidents.  Aris- 
totle's distinction  between  simple  and  com- 
plex plots  underlies  the  difference  between  the 
two  modern  forms.  Now  even  Hawthorne 
seems  not  quite  aware  of  this  difference. 
The  conception  of  Roger  MalvirCs  Burial 
(1832)  demands  more  development  of  char- 
acter than  is  possible  within  its  twenty-eight 
pages.  The  sense  of  artistic  unity  appears 
in  the  expiation  at  the  scene  of  guilt ;  but 
the  deficiency  of  form  also  appears  in  the  long 
time-lapse.  Alice  Doane^s  Appeal  (1835)  is 
the  hint  of  a  tragedy,  a  conception  not  far 
below  that  of  the  Scarlet  Letter.  For  lack 
of  scope  the  tragic  import  is  obscured  by 
trivial  description  ;  it  cannot  emerge  from 
the  awkward  mechanism  of  a  tale  within  a 
tale ;  it  remains  partial,  not  entire.  Like 
Alice  Doane,  Ethan  Brand  is  conceived  as 
the  culmination  of  a  novel.  To  say  that 
either  might  have  taken  form  as  a  short 
story  is  not  to  belittle  Hawthorne's  art, 
but  to  indicate  his  preference  of  method. 
Ethan  Brand  achieves  a  picturesqueness  more 

144. 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

vivid  than  is  usual  in  Hawthorne's  shorter 
pieces.  The  action  begins,  as  in  Hawthorne 
it  does  not  often  begin,  at  once.  The  nar- 
rative skill  appears  in  the  delicate  and 
thoroughly  characteristic  device  of  the  little 
boy  ;  but  imagine  the  increase  of  purely  nar- 
rative interest  if  Hawthorne  had  focused  this 
tale  as  he  focused  The  White  Old  Maid ;  and 
then  imagine  The  White  Old  Maid  itself 
composed  without  the  superfluous  lapse  of 
time,  like  The  Wives  of  the  Dead.  That 
Hawthorne  seems  not  to  have  realized  dis- 
tinctly the  proper  scope  of  the  short  story, 
and  further  that  he  did  not  follow  its  typical 
mode  when  that  mode  seems  most  apt, — 
both  these  inferences  are  supported  by  the 
whole  trend  of  his  habit. 

For  Hawthorne's  genius  was  not  bent  in 
the  direction  of  narrative  form.  Much  of 
his  characteristic  work  is  rather  descriptive. 
Sunday  at  Home,  Sights  from  a  Steeple, 
Main  Street,  The  Village  Uncle,  —  to  turn 
over  the  leaves  of  his  collections  is  to  be  re- 
minded how  many  of  his  short  pieces  are  like 

10  145 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


these.  Again,  his  habitual  symbolism  is 
handled  quite  unevenly,  without  narrative 
sureness.  At  its  best  it  has  a  fine,  per- 
meating suggestiveness,  as  in  The  Ambitious 
Guest ;  at  its  worst,  as  in  Fancy's  Sliow  Box, 
it  is  moral  allegory  hardly  above  the  chil- 
dren's page  of  the  religious  weekly  journal. 
Lying  between  these  two  extremes,  a  great 
bulk  of  his  short  fiction  shows  imperfect 
command  of  narrative  adjustments.  The 
delicate  symbolism  of  David  Swan  is  intro- 
duced, like  fifty  pieces  in  the  annuals,  whose 
authors  were  incapable  of  Hawthorne's  fancy, 
by  formal  exposition  of  the  meaning.  The 
poetry  of  the  Snow  Image  is  crudely  em- 
bodied, and  has  also  to  be  expounded  after 
the  tale  is  done.  The  lovely  morality  of  the 
Great  Stone  Face  has  a  form  almost  as  for  a 
sermon.  The  point  for  consideration  is  not 
the  ultimate  merit  of  Hawthorne's  tales,  but 
simply  the  tendency  of  their  habit  of  form. 
For  this  view  it  is  important  to  remember 
also  his  bent  toward  essay.  Description  and 
essay,  separately  and  together,  sum  up  the 

146 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

character  of  much  of  his  work  that  was  evi- 
dently most  spontaneous.  Perhaps  nothing 
that  Hawthorne  wrote  is  finer  or  more  mas- 
terly than  the  introduction  to  the  Scarlet 
Letter.  For  this  one  masterpiece  who  would 
not  give  volumes  of  formally  perfect  short 
stories  ?  Yet  if  it  is  characteristic  of  his 
genius  —  and  few  would  deny  that  it  is  — 
it  suggests  strongly  why  the  development  of 
a  new  form  of  narrative  was  not  for  him. 
This  habit  of  mind  explains  why  the  Marble 
Faun,  for  all  the  beauty  of  its  parts,  fails  to 
hold  the  impulse  of  its  highly  imaginative 
conception  in  singleness  of  artistic  form.  In 
his  other  long  pieces  Hawthorne  did  not  so 
fail.  The  form  of  the  novel  he  felt ;  and  it 
gave  him  room  for  that  discursiveness  which 
is  equally  natural  to  him  and  delightful  to 
his  readers.  But  the  form  of  the  short  story, 
though  he  achieved  it  now  and  again  —  as 
often  in  his  early  work  as  in  his  later  — 
he  seems  not  to  have  felt  distinctly.  And, 
whether  he  felt  it  or  not,  his  bent  and  prefer- 
ence were  not  to  carry  it  forward. 

147 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


III.    POE'S  FIXING  OF  THE  SHORT-STORY 
FORM 

V  OR  THE   REALIZATION   AND   DEVELOPMENT    OF 

the  short-story  form  lying  there  in  posse,  the 
man  of  the  hour  was  Poe.  Poe  could  write 
trenchant  essays ;  he  turned  sometimes  to 
longer  fictions ;  but  he  is  above  all,  in  his 
prose,  a  writer  of  short  stories.  For  thi 
work  was  he  born.  His  artistic  bent  uncon- 
sciously, his  artistic  skill  consciously,  moved 
in  this  direction.  In  theory  and  in  practice 
he  displayed  for  America  and  for  the  world 
a  substantially  new  literary  form.  What  is 
there  in  the  form,  then,  of  Poe's  tales  which, 
marking  them  off  from  the  past,  marks  them 
as  models  for  the  future  ?  Primarily  Poe,  as 
a  literary  artist,  was  preoccupied  with  prob- 
lems of  construction.  More  than  any  Amer- 
ican before  him  he  felt  narrative  as  structure  ; 
—  not  as  interpretation  of  life,  for  he  lived 
within  the  walls  of  his  own  brain ;  not  as 
presentation  of  character  or  of  locality,  for 
there  is  not  in  all  his  tales  one  man,  one 

148 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

woman,  and  the  stage  is  "  out  of  space,  out 
of  time  "  ;  but  as  structure.  His  chief  con- 
cern was  how  to  reach  an  emotional  effect  by 
placing  and  building.  When  he  talked  of 
literary  art,  he  talked  habitually  in  terms  of 
construction.  When  he  worked,  at  least  he 
planned  an  ingeniously  suspended  solution 
of  incidents ;  for  he  was  always  pleased  with 
mere  solutions,  and  he  was  master  of  the  de- 
tective story.  At  best  he  planned  a  series 
progressively  intensifying  a  single  emotion, 
an  edifice  of  creative,  structural  imagination. 
This  habit  of  mind,  this  artistic  point  of 
view,  manifests  itself  most  obviously  in  har- 
monization. Every  detail  of  setting  and  style 
is  selected  for  its  architectural  fitness.  The 
Poe  scenery  is  remarkable  not  more  for  its 
original,  phantasmal  beauty  or  horror  than 
for  the  strictness  of  its  keeping.  Like  the 
landscape  gardening  of  the  Japanese,  it  is  in 
each  case  very  part  of  its  castle  of  dreams. 
Its  contrivance  to  further  the  mood  may  be 
seen  in  the  use  of  a  single  physical  detail  as 
a  recurring  dominant,  —  most  crudely  in  the 

149 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

dreadful  teeth  of  Berenice,  more  surely  in 
the  horse  of  Metzengerstein  and  the  sound 
of  Morella's  name,  most  subtly  in  the  won- 
drous eyes  of  Ligeia.  These  recurrences  in 
his  prose  are  like  the  refrain  of  which  he  was 
so  fond  in  his  verse.  And  the  scheme  of  har- 
monization includes  every  smallest  detail  of 
style.  Poe's  vocabulary  has  not  the  ampli- 
tude of  Hawthorne's ;  but  in  color  and  in 
cadence,  in  suggestion  alike  of  meaning  and 
of  sound,  its  smaller  compass  is  made  to  yield 
fuller  answer  in  declaring  and  sustaining  and 
intensifying  the  required  mood.  Even  in 
1835,  the  first  year  of  his  conscious  prose 
form,  the  harmonizing  of  scene  and  of  dic- 
tion had  reached  this  degree  :  — 

"  But  one  autumnal  evening,  when  the  winds 
lay  still  in  heaven,  Morella  called  me  to  her 
bedside.  There  was  a  dim  mist  over  all  the 
earth,  and  a  warm  glow  upon  the  waters ;  and, 
amid  the  rich  October  leaves  of  the  forest,  a 
rainbow  from  the  firmament  had  surely  fallen. 

"'It  is  a  day  of  days,'  she  said,  as  I  ap- 
proached ;  '  a  day  of  all  days  either  to  live  or 

i 

150 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

die.  It  is  a  fair  day  for  the  sons  of  earth  and 
life  —  ah,  more  fair  for  the  daughters  of  heaven 
and  death  ! ' 

"  I  kissed  her  forehead,  and  she  continued : 

" ( I  am  dying  ;  yet  shall  I  live/ 

"  ■  Morella  ! ' 

"'The  days  have  never  been  when  thou 
couldst  love  me  —  but  her  whom  in  life  thou 
didst  abhor,  in  death  thou  shalt  adore.' 

"  <  Morella  ! ' 

" e  I  repeat  that  I  am  dying.  But  within  me 
is  a  pledge  of  that  affection  —  ah,  how  little  ! 
—  which  thou  didst  feel  for  me,  Morella.  And 
when  my  spirit  departs  shall  the  child  live  — 
thy  child  and  mine,  Morella's.'  " 

If  the  pattern  of  the  phrase  is  not  yet  so 
masterly  as  Poe's  later  habit,  it  is  already 
almost  the  last  word  of  adaptation. 

Yet  in  all  this  Poe  simply  did  better  what 
his  predecessors  had  done  already.  His  har- 
monizing of  scene,  of  style,  was  no  new  thing. 
The  narrative  form  itself  needed  more  artis- 
tic adjustment.  To  begin  with  what  now 
seems  to  us  the  commonest  and  most  obvious 
defect,  the  narrative  mood  and  the  narrative 


151 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

progress  must  not  be  disturbed  by  intro- 
ductory exposition.  Not  only  the  ruck  of 
writers  for  the  annuals,  but  even  Irving,  but 
even  sometimes  Hawthorne,  seem  unable  to 
begin  a  story  forthwith.  They  seem  fatally 
constrained  to  lay  down  first  a  bit  of  essay. 
Whether  it  be  an  adjuration  to  the  patient 
reader  to  mind  the  import,  or  a  morsel  of 
philosophy  for  a  text,  or  a  bridge  from  the 
general  to  the  particular,  or  an  historical 
summary,  or  a  humorous  intimation,  it  is  like 
the  juggler's  piece  of  carpet ;  it  must  be  laid 
down  first.  Poe's  intolerance  of  anything 
extraneous  demanded  that  this  be  cut  off. 
And  though  since  his  time  many  worthy  tales 
have  managed  to  rise  in  spite  of  this  inartic- 
ulate member,  the  best  art  of  the  short  story, 
thanks  to  his  surgery,  has  gained  greatly  in 
impulse.  One  can  almost  see  Poe  experi- 
menting from  tale  to  tale.  In  Berenice  he 
charged  the  introduction  with  mysterious 
suggestion ;  that  is,  he  used  it  like  an  over- 
ture ;  he  made  it  integral.  In  Morella,  the 
point  of  departure  being  similar,  the  theme 

152 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

is  struck  more  swiftly  and  surely,  and  the 
action  begins  more  promptly.  In  King  Pest, 
working  evidently  for  more  rapid  movement, 
he  began  with  lively  description.  Metzenger- 
stein  recurs  to  the  method  of  Berenice ;  but 
Ligeia  and  Usher,  the  summit  of  his  achieve- 
ment, have  no  introduction,  nor  have  more 
than  two  or  three  of  the  typical  tales  that 
follow. 

"  True  !  nervous  —  very,  very  dreadfully  ner- 
vous, I  had  been  and  am ;  but  why  will  you 
say  that  I  am  mad  ?  The  disease  had  sharpened 
my  senses  —  not  destroyed  —  not  dulled  them. 
Above  all  was  the  sense  of  hearing  acute.  I 
heard  all  things  in  the  heaven  and  in  the  earth. 
I  heard  many  things  in  hell.  How,  then,  am 
I  mad  ?  Hearken !  and  observe  how  healthily 
—  how  calmly  I  can  tell  you  the  whole  story." 
The  Tell-Tale  Heart  (1843). 

Every  one  feels  the  force  for  this  tale  of  this 
method  of  beginning;  and  to  many  story- 
readers  of  to-day  it  may  seem  obvious ;  but 
it  was  Poe,  more  than  any  one  else,  who 
taught  us  to  begin  so. 

153 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

The  idea  of  this  innovation  was,  negatively, 
to  reject  what  is  from  the  point  of  view  of 
narrative  form  extraneous ;  positively  it  was 
to  make  the  narrative  progress  more  direct. 
And  the  evident  care  to  simplify  the  narra- 
tive mechanism  for  directness  of  effect  is  the 
clue  to  Poe's  advance  in  form,  and  his  most 
instructive  contribution  to  technic.  This 
principle  explains  more  fully  his  method  of 
setting  the  scene.  The  harmonization  is 
secured  mainly  by  suppression.  The  tale 
is  stripped  of  every  least  incongruity.  In 
real  life  emotion  is  disturbed,  confused,  per- 
haps thwarted;  in  art  it  cannot  be  inter- 
preted without  arbitrary  simplification  ;  in 
Poe's  art  the  simplification  brooks  no  intru- 
sive fact.  We  are  kept  in  a  dreamland  that 
knows  no  disturbing  sound.  The  emotion 
has  no  more  friction  to  overcome  than  a 
body  in  a  vacuum.  For  Poe's  directness  is 
not  the  directness  of  spontaneity ;  it  has 
nothing  conversational  or  "  natural  "  ;  it  is 
the  directness  of  calculation.  So  he  had  little 
occasion  to  improve   his   skill   in  dialogue. 

154 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

Dialogue  is  the  artistic  imitation  of  real  life. 
He  had  little  use  for  it.  His  best  tales  arej 
typically  conducted  by  monologue  in  the  first 
person.  What  he  desired,  what  he  achieved,/ 
what  his  example  taught,  was  reduction  to  a 
straight,  predetermined  course.  Everything 
that  might  hinder  this  consistency  were  best 
away.  So,  as  he  reduced  his  scene  to  proper 
symbols,  he  reduced  it  also,  in  his  typical 
tales,  to  one  place.  Change  of  place,  lapse 
of  time,  are  either  excluded  as  by  the  law  of 
the  classical  unities,  or,  if  they  are  admitted, 
are  never  evident  enough  to  be  remarked. 
What  this  meant  as  a  lesson  in  form  can  be 
appreciated  only  by  inspecting  the  heavy 
machinery  that  sank  many  good  tales  before 
him.  What  it  means  in  ultimate  import  is 
the  peculiar  value  and  the  peculiar  limitation 
of  the  short  story  —  in  a  word,  its  capacity 
as  a  literary  form.  The  simplification  that 
he  set  forth  is  the  way  to  intensity ;  but  per- 
haps Hawthorne  saw  that  it  might  be  the  way 
to  artificiality. 

The  history,  then,  of  the  short  story  —  the 

155 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

feeling  after  the  form,  the  final  achievement, 
will  yield  the  definition  of  the  form.  The 
practical  process  of  defining  by  experiment 
compiles  most  surely  the  theoretical  defini- 
tion. And  to  complete  this  definition  it  is 
safe  to  scrutinize  the  art  of  Poe  in  still  other 
aspects.  His  structure,  appearing  as  har- 
monization and  as  simplification,  appears 
also  as  gradation.  That  the  incidents  of  a 
tale  should  be  arranged  as  progressive  to  a 
climax  is  an  elementary  narrative  principle 
not  so  axiomatic  in  the  practice,  at  least,  of 
Poe's  time  as  to  bind  without  the  force  of  his 
example.  Even  his  detective  stories,  in  their 
ingenious  suspense  and  their  swift  and  steady 
mounting  to  climax,  were  a  lesson  in  narra- 
tive. But  this  is  the  least  of  his  skill.  The 
emotional  and  spiritual  effects  that  he  sought 
as  his  artistic  birthright  could  be  achieved 
only  by  adjustments  far  more  subtle.  The 
progressive  heightening  of  the  style  corre- 
sponds to  a  nice  order  of  small  details  more 
and  more  significant  up  to  the  final  intensity 
of  revelation.     Little  suggestion  is  laid  to 

156 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 


suggestion  until  the  great  hypnotist  has  us 
in  the  mood  to  hear  and  feel  what  he  will. 
It  is  a  minute  process,  and  it  is  unhurried; 
but  it  is  not  too  slow  to  be  accomplished 
within  what  before  him  would  have  seemed 
incredible  brevity.  The  grading  of  every- 
thing to  scale  and  perspective,  that  the  little 
whole  may  be  as  complete,  as  satisfying,  as 
any  larger  whole  —  nay,  that  any  larger  treat- 
ment may  seem,  for  the  time  of  comparison, 
too  broad  and  coarse,  —  this  is  Poe's  finer 
architecture.  But  for  him  we  should  hardly 
have  guessed  what  might  be  done  in  fifteen 
pages;  but  for  him  we  should  not  know  so 
clearly  that  the  art  of  fifteen  pages  is  not  the 
art  of  a  hundred  and  fifty. 

Berenice  casts  a  shadow  first  from  the  fatal 
library,  chamber  of  doubtful  lore,  of  death, 
of  birth,  of  prenatal  recollection  "like  a 
shadow  —  vague,  variable,  indefinite,  un- 
steady; and  like  a  shadow,  too,  in  the  im- 
possibility of  my  getting  rid  of  it  while  the 
sunlight  of  my  reason  shall  exist."  The  last 
words  deepen  the  shadow.     Then  the  "boy- 

157 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

hood  in  books"  turns  vision  into  reality, 
reality  into  vision.  Berenice  flashes  across 
the  darkened  stage,  and  pines,  and  falls  into 
trances,  "disturbing  even  the  identity  of  her 
person."  While  the  light  from  her  is  thus 
turning  to  darkness,  the  visionary's  morbid 
attentiveness  is  warped  toward  a  monomania 
of  brooding  over  trivial  single  objects.  For 
the  sake  of  the  past  and  visionary  Berenice 
betrothed  with  horror  to  the  decaying  real 
Berenice,  he  is  riveted  in  brooding  upon  her 
person  —  her  emaciation  —  her  face  —  her 
lips  —  her  teeth.  The  teeth  are  his  final 
curse.  The  rest  is  madness,  realized  too 
horribly,  but  with  what  final  swiftness  of 
force!  No  catalogue  of  details  can  convey 
the  effect  of  this  gradation  of  eight  pages. 
Yet  Berenice  is  Poe's  first  and  crudest  elabo- 
ration. The  same  static  art  in  the  same  year 
moves  Morella  more  swiftly  through  finer  and 
surer  degrees  to  a  perfectly  modulated  close 
in  five  pages.  His  next  study,  still  of  the 
same  year,  is  in  the  grotesque.  The  freer 
and  more  active  movement  of  King  Pest 

158 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

shows  his  command  of  the  kinetic  short  story 
of  incident  as  well  as  of  the  static  short  story 
of  intensifying  emotion.  By  the  next  year 
he  had  contrived  to  unite  in  Metzenger stein 
the  two  processes,  culminating  intensity  of 
feeling  and  culminating  swiftness  of  action, 
for  a  direct  stroke  of  terror  and  retribution. 
By  1836  Poe  knew  his  art;  he  had  only  to 
refine  it.  Continuing  to  apply  his  method 
of  gradation  in  both  modes,  he  gained  his  own 
peculiar  triumphs  in  the  static,  —  in  a  situa- 
tion developed  by  exquisite  gradation  of  such 
infinitesimal  incidents  as  compose  Berenice 
to  an  intense  climax  of  emotional  suggestion, 
rather  than  in  a  situation  developed  by  grada- 
tion of  events  to  a  climax  of  action.  But  in 
both  he  disclosed  the  fine  art  of  the  short 
story  in  drawing  down  everything  to  a  point. 
For  all  this  was  comprehended  in  Poe's 
conception  of  unity.  All  these  points  of 
technical  skill  are  derived  from  what  he 
showed  to  be  the  vital  principle  of  the  short 
story,  its  defining  mark,  —  unity  of  impres- 
sion through  strict  unity  of  form.     "Totality 

159 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

of  interest,"  an  idea  caught  from  Schlegel, 
he  laid  down  first  as  the  principle  of  the  short 
poem,1  and  then  as  the  principle  of  the  tale.2 
And  what  this  theory  of  narrative  should 
imply  in  practice  is  seen  best  in  Poe.  For 
Hawthorne,  though  he  too  achieves  totality 
of  interest,  is  not  so  surely  a  master  of  it  pre- 
cisely because  he  is  not  so  sure  of  the  technic. 
His  symbolism  is  often  unified,  as  it  were,  by 
logical  summary;  for  Poe's  symbolism  sum- 
mary would  be  an  impertinence.  Poe's  har- 
monization, not  otherwise,  perhaps,  superior 
to  Hawthorne's,  is  more  instructive  as  being 
more  strictly  the  accord  of  every  word  with 
one  constantly  dominant  impression.  His 
simplification  of  narrative  mechanism  went 
in  sheer  technical  skill  beyond  the  skill  of  any 
previous  writer  in  opening  a  direct  course  to 

1  In  a  review  of  Mrs.  Sigourney,  Southern  Litera- 
ary  Messenger,  volume  ii,  page  113  (January,  1836); 
quoted  in  Woodberry's  Life  of  Poe,  page  94. 

2  In  a  review  of  Hawthorne,  Graham's  Magazine, 
May,  1842  ;  Stedman  and  Woodberry's  edition  of  Poe, 
volume  vii,  page  30 ;  quoted  in  the  appendix  to  Brander 
Matthews's  Philosophy  of  the  Short-Story. 

160 


THREE  STUDIES  IN  THE  SHORT  STORY 

a  single  revealing  climax.  His  gradation, 
too,  was  a  progressive  heightening  and  a  nice 
drawing  to  scale.  All  this  means  that  he 
divined,  realized,  formulated  the  short  story 
as  a  distinct  form  of  art.  Before  him  was 
the  tale,  which,  though  by  chance  it  might 
attain  self-consistency,  was  usually  and  typi- 
cally incomplete,  either  a  part  or  an  out- 
line sketch;  from  his  brain  was  born  the 
short  story  as  a  complete,  finished,  and  self- 
sufficing  whole. 


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